MAYBE!
How’s that for going out on a limb?
In a poll released yesterday among 409 “likely” Democratic primary voters, McAuliffe led with 38% while Moran and Deeds each polled 22%. Interestingly, 64% of those polled said they could change their mind and vote for a different candidate in June.
I have been a broken record about the difficulty of identifying real primary voters in a low turnout election and I’m going to scratch away one more time at this.
The Survey USA Poll sampled 1,396 registered voters and, out of this sample, the company determined that 409 voters were “likely” participants in the June 9th Democratic primary.
In essence, the poll states that 29% of the registered voters in Virginia are “likely” voters in the Virginia Democratic primary.
This is preposterous.
A turnout this high would bring out approximately 350,000 more voters than turned out for the Democratic presidential primary in 2008 when Barack Obama was up against Hilary Clinton.
There are many insiders, including quite a few in the Moran and Deeds camps, who do not believe that 350,000 voters total will show up for the primary.
So the bottom line is that it’s almost impossible to draw any reliable conclusions from the survey about the outcome of the Democratic primary, at least the way that it has been publicly presented. We would be in a lot better position to make some sense of it if the poll had at least tried to distinguish “definite” primary voters from “potentials.”
Yet…
It may not be totally meaningless and we may be able to glean some useful information from it.
The survey does confirm the belief that McAuliffe benefits from a large primary electorate. The more that McAuliffe is able to expand the electorate, the better off he will be.
It also does appear that a number of people who consider themselves Democrats have yet to make up their minds about who they will support (and, I would add, whether they are really going to vote or not). I tend to think that this may favor McAuliffe as well, because he he will have the lion’s share of the financial resources to deliver a message to the undecideds in the last weeks of the campaign.
In some way, the results of this poll by itself should not be too damaging to Deeds and Moran.
The prospect that 29% of the registered voters in Virginia will show up for the Democratic primary is so ridiculous it will make it easy for them to dismiss the results.
But I can also tell you that any poll with these kind of numbers evokes anxiety and probably some anger inside the campaigns.
What Moran and Deeds cannot afford right now is another poll, more rigorously conducted, that reports anything resembling similar results.
At the moment, both Deeds and Moran have done an excellent job of locking up the support and endorsements of many local officials across the state, people who would rather go with someone they know and have worked with than a person making an initial run at elected office.
But if McAuliffe actually appears to be breaking out of the pack and becoming a frontrunner, another dynamic will emerge, one in which people begin to attach themselves to the likely winner, wanting him to remember that they “were with him from the beginning.”
Deeds and Moran know if McAuliffe gains “momentum” in the race, he will be very difficult to derail.
If the internal polling in the Moran and Deeds camps are very different from the Survey USA results, I expect they’ll be finding a way to release these numbers very soon.
The race is so low-profile that anyone who can hold an opinion on either candidate could be considered a likely voter. If 29% of respondents had an opinion, then it isn’t difficult to begin narrowing the pool further by looking at self-reported participation in other primaries and general elections. When you see who benefits as the screen changes then you will know for whom the poll is cooked.