Posted October 30, 2008
Pa. voters debunk key McCain strategy
| In recent days, Senator McCain has called Senator Obama and the Democratic leaders of the House and Senate “a dangerous threesome,” and Governor Palin has warned of a Democratic “monopoly in Washington.” The McCain campaign has sought to take advantage of the electorate’s inclination to divide control of Congress and the presidency between the parties and use the prospect of Democratic control of Congress to benefit the Republican presidential candidate. |
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The most recent Temple Poll shows that the Pennsylvania electorate, one in which McCain trails Obama by 9 percentage points, supports the principle of a divided federal government. A majority of likely voters in the Commonwealth—51 percent—believe control of the presidency and Congress should be split between the parties, while just 18 percent believe one party should control both branches. Twenty-eight percent say it does not matter whether or not government is divided. |
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| The Poll also finds, however, that the portion of the Pennsylvania electorate whose plans for the presidential election might be altered by an appeal to the principle of divided government is likely to be considerably smaller. Forty-seven percent of the state’s likely voters say they will vote for the Democratic candidate in their Congressional district and 40 percent say they will vote for the Republican, with 13 percent undecided. Those who support Democratic House candidates are less supportive than those who support Republican candidates of dividing control of government. Just 43 percent of those who support Democratic candidates believe control should be split. Among voters who support both divided control and Democratic House candidates, 17 percent already intend to vote for McCain. Seventy-five percent intend to vote for Obama. All told, the group targeted by an appeal to divided government — Pennsylvanians who believe control of Congress and the presidency should be split but do not intend to vote a straight Democratic ticket—amount to 15 percent of likely voters. |
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Although they support the idea that control of the federal government should be divided between the parties, a majority in the targeted group identify strongly with the Democratic Party. A total of 91 percent are Democrats. Only 5 percent are Independents, and only 4 percent are Republicans. “It would be difficult for the McCain campaign to turn the election around in Pennsylvania by appealing to the principle of divided government,” said Michael Hagen, director of the Temple Poll. “In order to succeed, Senator McCain would have to persuade more than half the voters for whom the argument might make a difference to switch their presidential votes, and 9 in 10 of those voters identify themselves as Democrats—more than half of them as strong Democrats.” |
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The Temple Poll is sponsored by Temple University’s Institute for Public Affairs in the College of Liberal Arts. For this Poll, a randomly selected sample of 1,001 Pennsylvanians registered to vote were interviewed by telephone between Oct. 20 and 26, 2008. Once the interviewing was complete, the data were weighted to correct for unequal probabilities of selection and response, and to ensure that the demographic characteristics of the sample match the population of registered voters in Pennsylvania. The sample included 761 likely voters, identified on the basis of their voting history and engagement with the campaign. With samples of these sizes, the overall margin of error attributable to sampling is 3.1 percentage points for the sample of registered voters, 3.6 percentage points for the sample of likely voters. The sampling error for subgroups is larger. |
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