Rasmussen: Obama's Approval Rating With Uncommitted Voters Is A Glittering 63%
Wait, Did I Say 63%? My Error, I Meant 29%.

I always get those two confused, like "their" and "they're."

This is one of the most important polling stats out there. I wrote about this before. Larry Sabato looked at previous polls and had several conclusions: 1, there are not very many swing voters at all. 2, they're unenthusiastic about voting (which either causes, or is caused by, the fact that they're uncommitted and don't love either candidate).

And 3, they don't much like this Barack Obama character:

Swing voters had much more negative opinions of President Obama’s job performance than other voters. In fact, their opinions were almost as negative as those of Romney supporters. Only 11% of swing voters approved of Obama’s job performance compared with 6% of Romney voters. In contrast, 92% of Obama voters approved of the president’s job performance.

[Quoting Sabato, if that's not clear.]

Sabato's conclusion was that a higher-turnout election actually favored Romney, because if these unenthusiastic Obama critics actually make it to the polls, they'll vote against Obama (or against him about 70% to 30%).

Interestingly, Obama's down-and-dirty negative campaign dovetails nicely with his best strategy, which is to depress the vote among all but his most reliable partisans. Making the election about nothing except negative attacks should do that for him.

Even though Romney has an edge with these True Undecideds, they're small in number. Sabato, IIRC, pegged them at no more than 10%, and yesterday's CBS/NYT poll had it that only four percent were undecided. (Four percent?!)

Still, a 70/30 split with 5% of the population means a net gain of 2% in the overall vote (3.5% for Romney, 1.5% for Obama)-- assuming we can get these people to the polls, which, at the current moment, is in doubt.

Sabato noted of the True Undecideds...

...compared with voters supporting a candidate, swing voters were disproportionately white and female.

I don't know how "disproportionately" white and female they were, though.

Several crude methods of appealing to these voters occur to me, but they're so obvious I won't insult you by noting them.

Free Shoes? So suggests Dr. Spank. I sense a riff.

Thanks to @gabrielmalor.

posted by Ace at 01:27 PM

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