Public Policy Polling (10/9-10, likely voters, 8/21-22 in parentheses):
Alex Sink (D): 46 (36)
Rick Scott (R): 41 (30)
Undecided: 14 (22)
(MoE: ±4.6%)
How I feel about this race seems to change weekly, if not daily… and that seems largely dependent on which particular pollsters (and how they model the electorate) are offering results that week, and who’s dominating the advertising tempo that week. That seems to be the only explanation for how last week Rick Scott seemed to be taking over, but now (especially with Sink’s damning 2-minute ad about Scott’s Medicare fraud running now) — between a 4-point Mason-Dixon lead, a 1-point deficit in Quinnipiac (down from a big Scott lead in their first post-LV-switch poll), and even a 3-point ballgame in Rasmussen this week — the needle seems to be swinging back to Alex Sink.
As always, the picture of the trendlines (here dialed up to more sensitivity) is worth a thousand words. Click here for trendlines (and dial it up to “more sensitivity” for full effect of the last few weeks).
As for PPP’s specific numbers, the gap is still about the same; their old post-primary numbers don’t add up to 100 because Bud Chiles was drawing 8 (which seems to have been equally allocated between Sink and Scott with his departure). Sink’s favorables are 44/38 compared with 33/52 for Scott; helping Scott, though, seems to be progress uniting Republicans behind him (he pulls 77% of GOPers, up from 57% post-primary, while Scott’s at 76% of Dems), and a decidedly Republican-leaning likely voter pool (the sample went 51-44 in favor of McCain in ’08).
Kos mad about this issue….
Cell Phone bias in polls
http://pewresearch.org/pubs/17…
“The latest estimates of telephone coverage by the National Center for Health Statistics found that a quarter of U.S. households have only a cell phone and cannot be reached by a landline telephone. Cell-only adults are demographically and politically different from those who live in landline households; as a result, election polls that rely only on landline samples may be biased. Although some survey organizations now include cell phones in their samples, many — including virtually all of the automated polls — do not include interviews with people on their cell phones. (For more on the impact of the growing cell-only population on survey research, see “Assessing the Cell Phone Challenge,” May 20, 2010).”