Garden State Politics

Posted by admin on October 3rd, 2009 in Uncategorized

Jason Springer at Blue Jersey looks at the polling data for our gubernatorial race. It’s worth taking a look at, and worth following the links to understand. But I have a general problem with the methodology (not Jason’s, the folks at Pollster.com).

When you include all polls, that means you are, by definition, including the ones that are really bad. Like every single one done by Neighborhood Research. You can’t take one poll that uses less than 400 respondents and average it in with one that has over 1100. It just doesn’t help anything.

Statistically, the better thing to do is to simply throw out the Neighborhood Reasearch poll. Even the polls from Monmouth University and DKos use around half of the respondents as the Quinnipiac poll. The only benefit of comparing them is to see how closely those likely voter models agree with the more statistically sound Q-pac poll.

I’d say there are two things to take from this latest round of polling. First, Jon Corzine’s support is flat. If he’s going to win, then he’ll win with no more than 40-42 percent of the vote. Second, Christie is still ahead of the Governor, by enough to put him outside of the margin of error.

There is some reason for Christie to worry. He lost about half of his margin of victory in the last month. If he wants to make sure he wins, then he needs to stop playing Jon Corzine’s game – stop whining about how Corzine distorts his record. People just naturally move away from whiners. Plus, every time Christie mentions Corzine’s attacks, he repeats them.

The problem, of course, is that Christie, apparently, has never had any sort of campaign plan. He’s just cruising along, responding to things as they come up and letting dissatisfaction do his job for him. He might still be able to win with that non-strategy. At this point, it’s difficult to see his campaign coming up with anything solid to use for the next four weeks.

If anyone wonders what role Daggett will play, he appears to be scooping up the disaffected Democrats, and a few unaffiliated voters. The erosion of Christie’s support is mostly from Democrats deciding they can’t vote for the Republican and going with the Independent instead. That’s why I think that the three point lead that Christie has now will stick with him.

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