Gallup's Racially Biased Polls

By Ruy Teixeira, The Center for American Progress and The Century Foundation. Posted October 27, 2004.

From the Center for American Progress and The Century Foundation:

In this edition of Public Opinion Watch:

(covering polls and related articles from the week October 18-24, 2004)

• Bush's Battleground Blues
• Kerry Leads by Thirteen Points among College Students, Twenty-five Points among New Voters
• Gallup Poll Racially Biased
• Bush's Barriers to Re-election
• The Nader Nonfactor
• Tracking the Tracking Polls

Bush's Battleground Blues

Poll results in the battleground states have generally been good for Kerry lately, especially in the most important of these states (for example, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Florida).

In that light, it's interesting to note that five recently released national polls give Kerry solid leads of six to seven points in the battleground states overall. In 2000, these states broke evenly between Gore and Bush, so a six- to seven-point Kerry lead, if real, would be quite significant. Here are the polls and the numbers:

Democracy Corps (October 20-21): 52 percent to 45 percent
Marist (October 17-19): 50 percent to 43 percent
Pew (October 15-19): 49 percent to 43 percent
NBC/Wall Street Journal (October 16-18): 49 percent to 43 percent
Harris (October 14-17): 51 percent to 44 percent

Of course, not all polls show a Kerry lead of this magnitude in the battleground states. But Mark Blumenthal of Mystery Pollster has looked at a substantially wider range of recent polls and finds Kerry's battleground performance running ahead of his national performance in every single one. As Chris Bowers points out over at MyDD, Blumenthal's data show Kerry averaging a 49 percent to 45 percent advantage in the battleground.

And Bush's woes don't end there. The latest unemployment data from the battleground states show Wisconsin and Iowa with increased unemployment rates in the last month and Ohio's remaining stubbornly high at 6 percent.

It could be tough for Bush to get votes where he needs them the most.

Sources used for this section:

Marist College poll of 1,175 adults, released October 18, 2004 (conducted October 17-19, 2004)

Hart/McInturff poll of 1,004 registered voters for NBC News/Wall Street Journal, released October 19, 2004 (conducted October 16-18, 2004)

Princeton Survey Research poll of 1,568 adults for Pew Research Center, released October 20, 2004 (conducted October 15-19, 2004)

Harris poll of 1,016 adults, released October 20, 2004 (conducted October 14-17, 2004)

Greenberg Quinlan Rosner poll of 1,015 likely voters for Democracy Corps, released October 22, 2004 (conducted October 21-22, 2004)

*****

Kerry Leads by Thirteen Points among College Students, Twenty-five Points among New Voters

John Kerry Leads George Bush 52 percent to 39 percent among American college students, according to a Harvard University Institute of Politics Poll conducted October 7-13. The poll also found that Kerry leads among college student likely voters (LVs) in fourteen swing states by 55 percent to 38 percent.

In addition, a new Ipsos-AP analysis of their poll data shows new voters leaning very heavily toward Kerry.

Among LVs who are new voters, Kerry is favored over Bush by a smashing twenty-five points, 60 percent to 35 percent. Moreover, these new voters were twice as likely to say they'd been contacted by the Kerry campaign (38 percent) than by the Bush campaign (16 percent).

The Ipsos-AP analysis provides this sketch of new voters' demographics and political attitudes:

New voters tend to be young (64% are under 35), unmarried (54%), with some college experience (36%) and holding down a full-time job (63%), often in the service sector or skilled trades. They say the country is heading in the wrong direction (68%) and disapprove of Bush's performance as President (63%) and his handling of Iraq (65%), in particular.

Obviously, the more of these voters that show up at the polls on November 2, the better for John Kerry.

Ruy Teixeira is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and The Century Foundation.

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