Presidential Primary Reform Week: National Primary with a Twist

This is part one in a series of posts this week dealing with presidential primary reform. As a refresher you can also look at FHQ's earlier synopsis of several of the various reform proposals that have been talked about and/or considered. The maps are a little clunky, but will suffice for now. I'm planning a revamping of them in the not too distant future.

On Friday, FairVote went public with a novel idea for presidential nomination reform. Here's their idea (and please follow the link above to read the full explanation of the proposal):

"The entire political universe, from the heights of the Washington establishment to the depths of the grassroots, agrees that our presidential nominating process needs to be reformed. But while there is broad consensus that a problem exists, there are myriad diagnoses as to what actually needs fixing. As the parties begin internal and interparty discussions about what elements need tweaking, it‘s time to take a serious look at more extensive and comprehensive reforms that will truly fix the process. The parties should begin to debate a plan that includes traditional state-based nomination contests culminating in a final, decisive national primary." [Emphasis mine]

I really like this idea, but for a few things...

1) Coordinated action. This is another idea that will require coordinated effort from both national parties. I don't see this as the monumental roadblock that I once did. Folks from both sides seem to be mindful of the fact that now is the time to hammer something meaningful out on reform. Of course, one man’s meaningful is another man’s useless.

2) $$$$. The idea of moving congressional primaries to coincide with the national primary is ingenious. It is also imperative. Without that, states would be confronted with footing the bill for another (separate) election. I’m not sure, but I’m fairly certain that this current period is not the proper time to be pushing an additional election to be paid for with taxpayer money. Call it a hunch. The other side of this is that it probably wouldn’t just be congressional primaries moved but all primaries. And there may be some complications there because that would obviously include state legislative primaries (in most states). If any perceived negative impact surfaces there, state legislators — the folks primarily tasked with initiating these election date changes — may put their own self interests above the national party’s. Now, what could be seen as a negative impact to state legislators? First and foremost, the most problematic aspect is turnout. Some legislators might prefer lower turnout primary elections. Those conditions are to their advantage, after all.

3) Delegates/conventions. One major piece missing from this puzzle is the delegate calculation. What effect does the national primary have on the allocation of delegates? Are the state contests merely just the first round (beauty contests)? Does the national primary determine the allocation of all the delegates or just a certain percentage? And finally, what does this do to the convention? I suppose the same rules apply, but this national primary idea has an air of finality to it. "The delegates are allocated. Let the general election begin!" This last point is a minor issue. If this plan was instituted, the parties, I'm sure, would go on having their conventions as if nothing had happened. It isn't as if the conventions have been decisive of late (though they could have been in 2008 if Hillary Clinton had kept her campaign going throughout the summer).

4) Candidates. What does this plan do to candidate strategy? Would candidates drop out as they do in the currently configured system? Super Tuesday does have a way of winnowing the field down to (usually) one candidate. But I don't know. Candidates may opt to tough it out. After all, the candidate who places second at the end of all the primaries and caucuses moves on to the runoff national primary. Money would be the determining factor there, though. If you don't have any money you can't go on. What a national primary like this does accomplish, though, is basically a reset. Things kinda sorta go back to the way they were prior to the McGovern-Fraser reforms in one respect: there's a prize at the end of the calendar. Look at the allocation of Democratic delegates in 1976. The date on which the most delegates were at stake was the last one on the calendar. This proposed system, however, would have all of the delegates (it seems) at stake on the final date. In that regard, some of the same dynamics that prevailed in the earlier iterations of the McGovern-Fraser system would return in the revised system. Mainly, that would mean that, sure, candidates would drop out as they do now (when they aren't catching on), but it would also potentially mean that you would have candidates jumping in the contest midstream (depending on how frontloaded the calendar is -- If the calendar is like 2008, it wouldn't have made sense for, say, Jeb Bush to have jumped in after Super Tuesday's delegate giveaway. There likely wouldn't have been enough delegates left to counter McCain's lead after February 5.) as well. Essentially, then, this proposed system would offer two opportunities for buyers' remorse: once by giving a late-arriving candidate a chance to catch on and then again in the national primary when the second place finisher goes against the frontrunner (the winner of the most contests).

5) Turnout. One last hypothetical and I'll wrap this up. What if candidates continue to drop out of the race as they do now and the winner becomes a foregone conclusion? Not only that, but what if the party is satisfied with the "presumptive nominee"? Does the national primary, then, become something akin to the conventions now: a formality? If the national primary is a formality, then that is likely going to be a low turnout affair, which is something, I think, that would be against the wishes of those who have crafted the idea. Another argument along these same lines is that the national primary, in such a situation (low turnout), would become an election ripe for insurgency. Again, let's look at the 2008 Republican nomination contest. Let's assume that everything was the same about the contest, but that there was a national primary at the end. Why would Republicans go to the polls on the national primary day? The contest is over, right? Yes and no. Seemingly McCain has won, but technically, he hasn't. What if Ron Paul was able to quietly (or perhaps not so quietly) call on his supporters to turnout and vote? Would his loyal following amount to enough to overcome a low turnout in favor of McCain? Maybe, maybe not, but here's guessing that the GOP wouldn't even want to consider the possibility. [Of course, 2008 would have played out differently had there been a national primary at the end. Neither Huckabee nor Romney would have withdrawn from the race, I suspect.]

I don’t know that any of these things are deal breakers, but I do think they are factors that would have to be ironed out to some extent to avoid any unintended consequences. And despite the fact that I often come down hard on these reform plans, what I ultimately want to avoid are unintended consequences that make matters worse. But some might argue with me about the ways in which (or whether) things could get worse in the current presidential nomination system.


Hat tip to Matthew Shugart over at Fruits and Votes for the link.

Part Two of this series tomorrow will deal with another new and sweeping reform proposal. Stay tuned...


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Join FHQ for Presidential Primary Reform Week This Week

Democratic Change Commission and Republican Temporary Delegate Selection Committee meetings notwithstanding, there has been enough news about the parties' methods of nominating presidential candidates recently to warrant an entire week devoted to the process, and perhaps more importantly, the process of reform. Each day this coming week, then, FHQ will discuss one reform proposal specifically or some relevant news about the process that really has not seen the light of day yet. We'll start tomorrow off with an interesting new proposal I caught wind of late Friday and progress from there.

Also coming this week:

1) Tomorrow starts the week off with a bang and no, not just because of the announced series of posts above. [I've got better things to do than worry about that sort of thing.] Public Policy Polling will be releasing their July numbers for the 2012 general election trial heats (Obama v. Gingrich/Huckabee/Palin/Romney) on Monday. Be on the lookout for an update of our 2012 graphs and additional analysis soon thereafter.

2) Also, on Tuesday or more likely on Wednesday, PPP will have some numbers out of Louisiana. There's likely to be an Obama/Jindal head-to-head poll in there, but I may be guilty of having misinterpreted the intent of that poll in an earlier post. The line from the PPP blog read, "...is Bobby Jindal more popular in his home state than Tim Pawlenty?" Now, that seems like there is going to be a head-to-head between Pawlenty and Jindal in Louisiana, but was likely a reference to Pawlenty's position in an earlier survey the company did in Minnesota. If your hopes skyrocketed because of my post, I apologize. [But it does read that way. It should have been written, "...is Bobby Jindal more popular in his home state than Tim Pawlenty was in his?"]

3) There may also be a vote on the Sotomayor nomination sometime this week. Thus far, FHQ has remained quiet on this issue. That's mainly because the vote in the Senate is what I've been waiting for. Only that is likely to shift candidates' electoral fortunes in the future. If that hasn't been hammered to death by the blogosphere, then I may have something to say about a select few races (depending upon how the vote goes).


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Presidential Primary Frontloading (1976-2008)

[Click to Enlarge]

1) The darker the map gets, the earlier the contests are.
2) States vertically split in two on any of the maps are states that had contests on different dates for the two parties. Democratic contests are on the left and Republican contests are on the right.

This isn't anything new. These are the same maps that have been residing in the left sidebar (see said sidebar for the attendant primary calendars) for a while now, but the above is probably a better representation of the frontloading trend over time. Sure, you can scroll down the page or look at the slideshow of the changes, but this more immediately demonstrates the effect with each of the maps side by side.


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Search Engine Wars? FHQ Prefers Google

There's been a discussion in the tech press lately concerning the pros and cons of Google and the newly refurbished Microsoft search engine, dubbed Bing. No, this has nothing to do with presidential primaries, the 2012 election or anything of that ilk. In fact, it is more horn tooting, I suppose, than anything else. FHQ gets a steady stream of traffic based on people searching online for a number of things: electoral college maps, divisive primaries and generally anything having to do with 2012. I like knowing that people can search using those keywords and find their way to FHQ to discover what I hope they perceive as meaningful information. Hey, that's why this site exists. I could certainly do all the things that I do here and not post them, but why not share? Increasingly the internet is transforming into a highly efficient means of sharing information from the mundane to academic research. [FHQ lies somewhere in the middle, but operates under the assumption that what may be mundane to one man, may be enlightening/academic to the next.]

But what about Google and Bing? Well, to my mind there was no better way for me to check out the search abilities of the upstart, Bing, than to use the typical keywords that guide traffic to FHQ. If Bing is so good/better than Google, then it will do the same and more in terms of introducing more eyeballs to FHQ, right? Sure, theoretically. But that's not what I found. Where FHQ would appear high on the Google list, it rarely appeared at all in Bing searches.

Huh?

Here are some examples:
2012 electoral college map (Google, Bing)
2012 primary calendar (Google, Bing)
Divisive primaries (Google, Bing)
*For the record, Yahoo settles in somewhere in between both ends of the Google/Bing spectrum.

This struck me as odd. But then I realized that Blogger/Blogspot is a Google service and it occurred to me that either Google is protecting their own or Microsoft is penalizing those outside of its accepted list of blog services. [Nah, surely big, competing businesses wouldn't do that!] In the end this is all very interesting to me. Look, FHQ gets a meager amount of traffic in the grand scheme of things, so it isn't that big a deal. But it is curious and makes me wonder if this has affected other bloggers out there.

Plus, it is a slow Saturday and this was something I was thinking about.


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What's Wrong with 2012 Polls?

There has been an entertaining discussion on the utility of polling going on this week between Conor Clarke over The Atlantic and John Sides (among others) at The Monkey Cage. Clarke got the ball rolling in the Idea of the Day special section of The Atlantic's site by questioning the usefulness of polls -- mainly the overabundance of them and the effect that has on democratic governance and government. Sides, in a rejoinder to Clarke's response to his rebuttal, counters by arguing polling's positives are based on the accountability, evidence and representativeness they provide. I'm not going to rehash the arguments here (but do urge you to go check the discussion out), but I did want to take issue with Sides on one of his closing remarks.

"Lest I sound like a cheerleader: some polls bug me, much as they must bug Clarke. I hate the vastly premature 2012 presidential trial heats, for example."

First, I should say that I obviously come down on Sides', uh, side of the argument, but this hits a little close to home considering the ramped up 2012 gazing on FHQ of late (see here, here, here and here). Also, before I get in to this, I think that it is instructive to make a distinction between the trial heats and the GOP primary polling for 2012. I find the latter to be of greater use simply because of the position the Republican Party finds itself in in the aftermath of last November's elections: out of the White House, out of power in both chambers of Congress and leaderless.

On that last point is where the primary polling is of particular import; it is gauging how Republicans perceive the field of candidates/leaders to be shaping up. Now, it may be that at this point in the cycle what we are seeing in the cross-tabs is being driven by nothing more than name recognition, but that is providing us with a baseline for comparison as this race fully formalizes over the next couple of years. Stated differently, it is providing us with some evidence of a basic ordering of candidates. We could rely on pundits to tell us that it is all Sarah Palin and Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee or we could poll it to find some evidence of this (Of course, the logical question that emerges here is whether the polling is influencing the pundit-speak or vice versa.). For a party that is leaderless on the national level, the 2012 nomination question is more than a mere proxy.

But what about these trial heats? I've tried to caution FHQ readers about the limitations of these polls. First of all, with the exception of the University of Texas poll last week, all of the national and statewide polls asking the "if the 2012 presidential election were held today" question have been conducted by Public Policy Polling. That, in addition to the relatively small sample sizes (only above 700 respondents) for their national polls, is a hit for these polls on the representativeness score. And I'll grant Sides that. This may not be the most representative series of polls and as a result may not be the best evidence of the true state of something (the 2012 GOP nomination) that may not be a race yet.*

Here's the kicker, though: You'd expect these trial heat numbers to track with either Obama's approval or favorability ratings. But they don't; not across the board at least. Let's look at those PPP trends (Obama v. Gingrich/Huckabee/Palin/Romney) on the national level versus the data on the president's approval and favorability:





Now, there's been a steady decline in both the approval and favorability trends since they peaked for Obama in December and January respectively. But that's not the trend we see across the Public Policy Polling surveys. Obama opened with good leads over all four prospective Republican candidates, widened those leads in May and came back a bit in June.

What's the deal with May? Why is it that those numbers go against the grain of what we might otherwise expect? It may be something as simple as sample size. The May poll was the only survey in which PPP had a national sample size approaching the 1000 (+/-) respondent mark that is standard. The others hover in the 600-700 range. Again, representativeness takes a hit in those circumstances. The interesting question from this is whether PPP's other numbers outside of May are over- or understating Obama's or the Republicans' positions relative to each other. If all the samples were 1000 respondents in size would we have witnessed a steady decay was we see in the national favorability and approval numbers for the president? That's really the question here.

So have I made the case for the 2012 polls here? No, I don't think so. There are some problems with these polls -- sample size and the fact that only one organization is doing the general election trial heats. But what this does provide is some context and that was one of Sides' underlying points in this discussion; that the interpretations of these polls be more than, "Here are the numbers" and that the folks consuming them do so with an eye to detail.

The thing about polling is that a snowball effect can build rather quickly. Once you start asking a question like "If the 2012 elections were held today who would you vote for?" all that does is trigger increased polling to find if there was any validity to the original results. And on and on it goes. Is it too early in the 2012 presidential cycle to begin asking this question? Maybe. McCain campaign (circa 2000) strategist, Mike Murphy just yesterday tweeted this: "New polling out on GOP '12 race. I say ignore it and heed the Milt Gwirtzman Rule; nothing matters till first contest." That dovetails with John Sides' statement and I partially agree with both of them.

But if the prospective candidates are seemingly acting as if they are running (There's no doubt in my mind that the not-so-behind-the-scenes campaigning and positioning that is currently going on is the opening salvo in the 2012 invisible primary.), then wouldn't it behoove us to have some data to back that up? If the candidates are active and fundraising (even if through their PACs), wouldn't make sense to have the other piece of the puzzle that is so often looked at in these candidate/nominee emergence models (Mayer, for example). And wouldn't that have at least some effect on the piece of the puzzle Cohen, et al. brought to the table in The Party Decides (endorsements)?

Perhaps. But it could also be that I just like the polls.

...even if they're too early and meaningless.

*Though, the actions of Huckabee, Palin, Pawlenty and Romney make it appear as if each is at least angling for a national run. Huckabee is making seemingly beneficial endorsements in Iowa (Chuck Grassley, Bob Vander Plaats) and Florida (Marco Rubio). Both are early states given the 2008 calendar (2012 is subject to change) and those endorsements are solid given that each would help among conservatives in primaries or caucuses closed to independents and Democrats. Palin's actions have been difficult to explain, but there seems to be some national ambition in there. Romney is building the organizational infrastructure necessary to be successful in 2012 given his fundraising and strategic disbursements to candidates and leaders within the party. And Pawlenty's decision not to seek a third term seems to have at least been somewhat politically driven. Again, there appears to be some upward ambition there.


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State of the Race: New Jersey Governor (7/16/09)

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On the day President Obama is to arrive in New Jersey to appear at a Corzine rally, the incumbent Democrat continues to lag almost ten points behind Chris Christie based on a new Monmouth poll [pdf]. Jon Corzine trails his Republican counterpart by a count of 45-37 (with independent candidate, Chris Daggett, polling at about 4%), but will an Obama visit help or is Corzine too far gone? The polling has been consistent in this race recently, thus the relative stability of FHQ's graduated weighted average. However, despite all this July evidence, there is at least some hope in this poll that Cozine can mount some modicum of a comeback.

Monmouth was at least kind enough to score respondents' answer on a 7 point scale similar to that of the traditional party identification measure. And that provides us with some measure of who remains persuadable as summer inches toward fall. Among those who named a candidate and are strongly behind their choice, Christie led in this poll 29-25, leaving 46% as either undecided or weak/leaning toward one of the candidates. When and if that particular number begins to drop, keep an eye on Corzine's numbers. If the incumbent is not gaining ground then, he's in for a long autumn.

*As was the case in the Quinnipiac poll two days ago, Christie is pulling in an above average share of the minority vote. The Q poll showed him at 29% among African Americans while this Monmouth poll has the Republican just under the one-quarter mark (24%) among African Americans and Hispanic combined. On the surface that makes it look as if many of those Democrats who are undecided or for Christie at this point are minority voters. And those might be two groups among which the president could help Governor Corzine.

[Click to Enlarge]

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Romney Leads 2012 GOP Race (...and in more than just the Gallup Poll)

FHQ has been in the habit of calling Mitt Romney the frontrunner for the 2012 Republican nomination despite polls conducted earlier in the year that have shown him trailing Mike Huckabee and/or Sarah Palin. That trend has also held in hypothetical general election match ups against President Obama. July, though, has been good to Mitt Romney. Perhaps it is due to poll respondents just coming around to the idea of Romney as a likable (and likable may not be the proper word) 2012 candidate or because all the commotion among other GOP prospects for 2012 (see Ensign, John and Sanford, Mark). That probably isn't an either/or proposition. Respondents likely look on Romney more favorably now simply because of what is going on among the other possibilities. Comparatively, the former Massachusetts governor looks quite good.

And though the favorable/unfavorable differential for Romney still trails both Palin and Huckabee among Republicans, the next-in-line guy for the GOP leads the pack in Gallup's look forward to the race for the Party of Lincoln's nomination. Here are the particulars:


And I'm assuming that the remaining 15% either did not have an opinion or named other candidates (who received 1% or less).

These results dovetail nicely with the similar Rasmussen results from last week. Romney leads but is clustered with Palin and Huckabee ahead of Newt Gingrich and well ahead of other prospective challengers with less name recognition (at this point). And though those top three have taken turns in the top spot, they have, as a group, consistently hovered above everyone else with only Gingrich coming close. Here's how the trend looks across the limited polling conducted thus far in 2009:

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But polling isn't really the full story. It never is. The Cohen, et al. (2008) book I've referenced several times in this space would have us look at fundraising totals and endorsements as well. As we're still in 2009, information on the latter is going to be hard to come by, so let's focus on the fundraising aspect, but more generally the financial activity of the top three's political action committees. With disclosure reports due to the Federal Elections Commission recently, a host of up-to-date data have been made public. Just this morning Chris Cillizza at The Fix examined not only how much Romney's Free and Strong America PAC had raised during the first five months of the year (the most recently filed report for Romney only covers January-May 2009), but also to whom the PAC was contributing. Here's Cillizza:

"Romney Fundraising Soars: Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney proved he is light years in front of his 2012 rivals in the fundraising game by collecting more than $1.6 million through his Free and Strong America PAC in the first six months of 2009, and spreading donations out to a variety of candidates and causes in critical states. Romney donated the maximum $6,800 to New Jersey Republican gubernatorial nominee and made a series of $5,000 donations to Bob McDonnell, Bill Bolling and Ken Cuccinelli who are running for governor, lieutenant governor and attorney general in Virginia this fall. Romney also directed contributions to key 2012 states; he donated $5,000 to South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint and used his affiliated state PAC to give $10,000 to the New Hampshire Republican Party and $1,000 to Jeb Bradley, a former congressman who won a New Hampshire state Senate special election earlier this year. A dozen Republican members of the House received $1,000 contributions from Free and Strong America including Minority Whip Eric Cantor (Va.) and National Republican Congressional Committee Chairman Pete Sessions (Texas). Romney ended June with $842,000 in the bank. The depth of Romney's fundraising coupled with the strategic smarts with which he doled the money out is evidence that he has never really stopped running for president following his primary loss to John McCain in 2008."

The formula, then, is not unlike Barack Obama's following the 2004 elections: raise money for and get involved in high profile races and strategically contribute to candidates in crucial (presidential) electoral locations. As the numbers indicate, Mitt Romney has had more of an opportunity to do this than the other two candidates he has been lumped in with in the early going of the 2012 cycle. Romney's Free and Strong America PAC has pulled in $1.6 million to Palin's SarahPAC's $733,000 to Huckabee's Huck PAC's $0 (Follow the links to the PAC's pages at OpenSecrets or the FEC.). [Note that the scales on the vertical axis in the figures below are different. Romney's bars may come in under where Huckabee's and Palin's are, but there's a more than 3:1 difference in those scales.]

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I actually saw Romney's financial numbers this morning before the Gallup poll and it got me thinking about the state of Huckabee's operation as well. Ed Kilgore, in tearing down what he called the Next-In-Line Myth, stated (I'm paraphrasing here) that if the measure of that status is the number of delegates won in a previous nomination cycle, then Huckabee has as much right to the next-in-line label as Romney. And that statement was in the back of my mind when I looked up Huckabee's (lack of a) haul during the first half of the year. What separates Romney from Huckabee and Palin is not polling (not at this point at least), but the money war and organization. In both regards, Romney has a pretty good head start over is competitors, making Cillizza's last statement above instructive.

The take home message here is that Romney is leading where it counts now -- fundraising -- and is angling for a solidification of the second part of the Cohen, et al. puzzle: endorsements. The former presidential candidate's ability to raise money allows him the relative luxury of contributing to the campaigns and PACs of leaders within the party and GOP candidates in close races for reelection. That sort of giving comes in handy when the invisible primary nears completion and endorsements are at a premium with Iowa and New Hampshire around the corner.


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Revisiting Democratic Delegate Allocation (1976-2008)

A few weeks ago when the Democratic Change Commission was holding its first meeting, FHQ posted a series of graphs the DNC produced to show the frontloading of delegate allocation over time. As I said then, "That, folks, is the impact of frontloading in a nutshell." To see the shift from 1976 to 2008 is somewhat staggering.

...well, if only the graphs were a little better. I wanted to see what those figures would look like if a line was added to account for the cumulative percentage of delegates throughout any given year's primary calendar. Ideally, you'd see a nearly even distribution of contests across primary season and a relatively straight line from 0 to 100% delegates allocated.

And that is essentially what is demonstrated in the recreation of the 1976 figure from the DNC (see below). There is some undulation, but basically there is a fairly even (linear) growth to that cumulative line. The same is true of the 1980 figure (not shown). The blue area, then is the weekly percentage of delegates allocated, while the red area is all the weeks to a given point stacked on top of each other.

[Click to Enlarge]

But in 1984, what starts is what I'll call the "volcano with a wind out of the west" phenomenon. [That's a long way of saying frontloading.] What popped up in 1984 was a burst of delegate allocation activity toward the beginning of the process. And over time that "volcano" has grown from a small hill to the towering mountain of Super Tuesday in 2008 (seen below).

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These are handy visuals that would fit right in (with a GOP version as well) on the monthly frontloading maps that adorn the left sidebar. Assembled, they basically tell the tale of frontloading since the McGovern-Fraser reforms took effect.

*I mentioned the 1984 figure, and should add that I'll be putting the entire series up at some point (probably in individual posts as time allows). In saying that I should also say that there is a problem with the 1988 and 1992 figures. If you look closely at the originals in the link at this post's outset, you'll see that those two years' patterns (and underlying data) mirror each other exactly. If however, you look at the calendars from 1988 and 1992, you can clearly see that they are similar, but not the same, calendars. At some point I'll have to fix that (I suspect the 1988 figure is the one that is off. Pay close attention to the hump on the left side of the Super Tuesday peak. That's Georgia and Massachusetts and the other states that jumped to the first week in March when the Democratic window expanded to include that week in 1992. There was no similar group of contests -- not in terms of numbers of delegates -- in 1988. Most of those southern contests were on the second Tuesday in March.)


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On the Polling Horizon: Louisiana 2012?

I ended today's North Carolina post bemoaning the fact that Louisiana had beaten out California and Iowa in Public Policy Polling's vote to determine the location of its next survey. But what's to bemoan. Sure we'll miss out on Iowa numbers three years in advance (Once we get to the end of 2011, there will be more Iowa polls than you can shake a stick at.), but Louisiana could be interesting as well.

...especially if...

"Louisiana: This one will be getting my personal vote. How does Charlie Melancon do against David Vitter, and in general is Vitter really vulnerable or not? Plus, is Bobby Jindal more popular in his home state than Tim Pawlenty?

Voting is open until 11 AM Wednesday, we'll do the poll in the winning state over the weekend, and start releasing numbers from it on Tuesday."

I don't think Jindal v. Pawlenty is a bad consolation, nor do I think Obama v. Jindal/Pawlenty in the Pelican state is all that bad (...if that's what we get). In other words, I'll see you all at the same time, same place as today next Tuesday or Wednesday.


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Rasmussen released the results from a new survey of the Virginia gubernatorial race earlier today and unlike the New Jersey case did not make a distinction between leaners and non-leaners. Oh well. What the poll did indicate was the Bob McDonnell continues to hold a small lead (44-41) over Creigh Deeds in the race for the top statewide slot in the Old Dominion. Oddly enough, that brings FHQ's graduated weighted average margin in the race to right at three points.

The noticeable thing about the polling conducted since the June 9 primary is that Rasmussen has tended to give Deeds a higher share of support relative to the other handful of polls released. In fact, Rasmussen's poll the day after the primary is the only poll (other than the Anzalone Lizst poll that FHQ is not incorporating into its averages) to show Deeds in the lead. This new poll, however, seems to be in line with the other recent polls that been conducted. As Christian Heinze at GOP12 pointed out today, though, Deeds has the higher "partisan ceiling" simply because he's pulling in fewer Democrats than McDonnell is Republicans at this point.

Deeds had a good June in terms of fundraising thanks to some assistance from the DGA and some labor organizations, but trails McDonnell overall in cash-on-hand. The extent to which the Democrat can unite blue Virginians and catch up in the money game will go a long way toward pulling him even with or pushing him past Bob McDonnell as the summer days fade into to fall. But we're not quite to August yet; still a ways to go.

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The Paths of Presidential Primary Frontloading

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