Skip to main content

Finally, some decent polling analysis of the NC Governor's race

CarolinaDem (from whom some other Dems who have attached state names to themselves could learn a bit about logical thinking) has posted one of the best analyses to date on the North Carolina governor's race that actually quantifies the impact that Libertarian Mike Munger is having on the contest:

In an election for North Carolina Governor today, 08/12/08, 12 weeks to the vote, Democratic Lieutenant Governor Beverly Perdue and Republican Mayor of Charlotte Pat McCrory finish effectively even, neither gaining ground, with Libertarian Mike Munger siphoning votes from both, according to this latest SurveyUSA election tracking poll conducted exclusively for WTVD-TV in Raleigh. Today, it's Perdue 47%, McCrory 44%, within the survey's 3.9 percentage point margin of sampling error. When Duke Professor Munger's 5% is added in, and combined with another 5% who are undecided, Perdue's slight advantage is not significant, at this hour. The contest is fluid. Compared to an identical SurveyUSA poll released four weeks ago, Perdue is flat, McCrory is down 2, Munger is up 2. Munger gets 7% of the male vote, taking votes from the Republican McCrory, and 7% of those 18 to 34, taking votes from the Democrat Perdue. McCrory leads by 18 points in Charlotte and the western portion of the state, where Munger gets 5% and Perdue is losing ground. Perdue leads by 18 points in the Raleigh and Greensboro areas, where Munger gets 5% and McCrory is losing ground. Perdue and McCrory are tied in southern and coastal North Carolina. Incumbent governor Mike Easley, first elected in 2000, is term limited. The seat is open. The current is swift.


Key points here:

1) Munger, like Libertarian Senate candidate Chris Cole, is not running as some sort of Nader-like barnacle fastened on the GOP hull. He's pulling in thoughtful, disenchanted voters from both parties. This is essential to the future of the Libertarian Party.

2) Now established at a firm 5%, Munger's numbers are large enough to allow firm regional and demographic analysis. He's scoring well among white males, among 17-34 year-olds, and is running equally well in the Charlotte/western NC and Raleigh/Greensboro regions. He's a legitimate state-wide candidate.

3) Munger's numbers will certainly go up after the October 15 debate, assuming that Bev Perdue has the guts to show up. I wouldn't. Dr Munger has a razor-sharp wit and no need to take prisoners (oops, sorry jason, I think I just veered off into hate speech there)....

North Carolina continues to be the Libertarian Party's most interesting and successful laboratory for experiments with electoral success.

Pity that neither Bob Barr nor national headquarters actually gives a shit.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Libertarian Martin Luther King Jr. Day post

In which we travel into interesting waters . . . (for a fairly long trip, so be prepared) Dr. King's 1968 book, Where do we go from here:  chaos or community? , is profound in that it criticizes anti-poverty programs for their piecemeal approach, as John Schlosberg of the Center for a Stateless Society  [C4SS] observes: King noted that the antipoverty programs of the time “proceeded from a premise that poverty is a consequence of multiple evils,” with separate programs each dedicated to individual issues such as education and housing. Though in his view “none of these remedies in itself is unsound,” they “all have a fatal disadvantage” of being “piecemeal,” with their implementation having “fluctuated at the whims of legislative bodies” or been “entangled in bureaucratic stalling.”   The result is that “fragmentary and spasmodic reforms have failed to reach down to the profoundest needs of the poor.” Such single-issue approaches also have “another common failing — ...
44 comments
Read more

Libertarian National Committee Deathwatch Part 1

As the LNC continues to lurch towards collapse, with the latest news of mass layoffs at HQ, I've decided to begin tracking those things leading the national party to irrelevance, even as state and local parties gain power. As news, rumors and rhetoric break out, I shall chronicle them in this ongoing series at Delaware Libertarian. Organizations approaching failure have a number of characteristics. One of the most striking is renunciation of their purpose and effort to reinvent themselves as a "me-too" provider of services in the marketplace. In this, the LNC has been on a collision course with destiny for a while now. Recently, for example, it hired Republican Party web site developer TerraEclipse to redesign the LNC web site . Terra created a web site very similar to those of the clients it brags most about -- far-right Republican conservatives like Tom McClintock and BJ Lawson. A quick look at the web site they built for the LNC is instructive. The tagline on the ...
22 comments
Read more

The disturbing decline of the Delaware blogosphere: a very unfortunate Around the Horn (even if it's not Friday)

I've noticed a change in my own blog-checking habits over the past several weeks, and I don't know if it's just me or the reality of the last month of a divisive political campaign. I automatically used to check out Delawareliberal first and several times a day, because it was where I could find edgy, thought-provoking, and (dare I say it) funny banter going on. These days visit several other spots first, and my visits to DL are both shorter and less engaged. Why? Because the combination of invading neo-con commenters with the stridency of some of the major contributors has led to such pleasant exchanges as a post dedicated to labeling another blogger racist by donviti, whose own sense of provocative humor is generally so far out there that he makes John Belushi doing Samurai bartender on the SNL look positively pro-Asian. Or I can find Delawaredem and jason periodically spewing the idea that anybody who is not a liberal or progressive Democrat is somehow a non-American,...
26 comments
Read more