Poll: Corzine 41, Christie 42, Daggett 14

by: Hopeful

Thu Oct 29, 2009 at 05:45:56 PM EDT

Anyone looking for certainty regarding the outcome of next week's gubernatorial election in New Jersey will not find it here. As has been demonstrated in poll after poll, this is a contest that does not seem eager to be easily resolved.

If you would like a hopeful story about why Corzine has a good chance despite being well below 50%, Steve Singiser gives you this:

For one thing, while there are few undecideds in this final installment of the Daily Kos/R2K poll, those that are still undecided tend to come from pools of voters which should favor Corzine. The subgroup with the largest proportion of undecided voters are African-Americans (still 13% undecided). Corzine is already leading this group 82-4. It is somewhat hard to imagine that Corzine will not pick up the lions' share of those undecided African-American voters.

Other groups with disproportionately high undecideds are Hispanic voters (69-23 for Corzine) and "Other" ethnic groups (69-21 for Corzine). Of the age cohorts, voters aged 18-29 (where Corzine enjoys a 14-point edge) make up most of the undecideds...

Also, it is worth noting that voters who are not firmly committed to a candidate might break more evenly than normal. Usually, they break to the challenger, because the incumbent is unpopular and the challenger usually is either undefined or reasonably well-liked. In this case, however, Christie is pretty darned unpopular himself (43-46). Furthermore, as the progression throughout the summer (and through multiple pollsters) has shown--the more he is known, the less he is liked.

I don't want to mislead you, he calls the race a "coin flip." Well, we'll see on Tuesday. Tune in here starting at 5:30AM if you would like to see the FDU results.  

Update: I thought I should point out for our newer readers that Daily Kos is the sponsor of the poll, but the telephone poll itself is carried out by the respectable, independent pollster Research 2000. It's not an internet poll. Kos, who started off analyzing polls like I am here, uses some of the money he makes off his very popular site and puts it into polling races that interest him. This is not any different than, say, the Gannett papers sponsoring the Monmouth poll.