| Let's take another break from advocacy to check the races. I just noticed in the Courier-Post that I missed Monday's polls from the William J. Hughes Center at the Richard Stockton College of New Jersey. They've again asked Zogby to poll South Jersey and given us data for the First, Second and Third Congressional Districts. The NJ1 (PDF) and NJ2 (PDF) polls have 400 likely voters each while the closer NJ3 (PDF) poll has 600.
Let's look at the easy districts first:
Rob Andrews (D) leads Dale Glading (R) 63.4% to 21.9%.
Frank LoBiondo (R) leads Gary Stein (D) 57.3% to 20.0%
Note that there are demographic numbers (party, age, race, education) included in the PDFs and you can see the district-level favoriability of the Representatives, President Obama and Governor Christie. Obama is over 50% (if barely) in all three districts. "Christie's decision to promote Atlantic City" does well in all districts but best in NJ2, which (gasp) includes Atlantic City. In other results, I trust no one is surprised that voters think "jobs and economy" is the top issue.
Now for the big race: Adler (37.1%) trails Runyan (40.3%), the first time I have seen that result. These seem like low percentages so late in the election, but note the 4.1% margin of error is larger than the difference. Runyan is at 48% favorable so any Adler attack ads have not been effective enough. Zogby says more Republicans than Democrats will vote in this race.
DeStefano (Tea Party) still draws in 4.9%. Almost half (37%) of those voters would switch to Runyan if "they learned the New Jersey Tea Party endorsed Jon Runyan and not Peter DeStefano." Half (48%) would switch if told ("they learned that the Democrats recruited DeStefano in order to hurt Runyan's chances for election." I'd like to hear more from the 4 DeStafano voters who would then switch to Adler! Small number statistics to be sure but you can see why those Democratic operatives wanted DeStafeno on the ballot and Republicans want to play up the story as much as possible. The poll was taken 10/18 to 10/22 so there's a real possibility the DeStefano voters have learned the story since the poll was taken. |
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