... could best be found (or lost) in the Bobster's home state.
Insider Advantage had him at 7.6% in May.
Insider Advantage had him at 5.6% and Zogby had him at 8% in June.
Rasmussen had him at 5% in mid-July; Insider Advantage reported him at 5% by month's end.
Rasmussen had Barr dropping to 3% in August.
The highest Barr appears in any September polls is 3% in Strategic Vision and 1% in Public Opinion Strategies.
Rasmussen, Insider Advantage, American Research Group, and Survey USA all found that Barr had completely disappeared from the radar, polling at less than 1% where he show up at all.
This is clearly a Bob Barr collapse, and not a Libertarian collapse in Georgia, as the countervailing case of Libertarian Senate candidate Allen Buckley proves:
Buckley was not even included in polling questions until August, when Mellman Group showed him at 3%.
During the month of September (aided by a series of debate and forum appearances), Buckley has been placed at 2% (Rasmussen), 4% (both by Strategic Vision and Public Opinion Strategies), and--most recently--at 8% (Survey USA).
[All of these figures from the Georgia poll summary page at DC Political Report.]
The same fade can be seen in North Carolina.
There Barr was polling as high as 6% in May [Public Policy Polling], but in September has dropped to 5% [PPP], 2% [Opinion Research], 1% [TeleOpinion Research], and invisible [Rasmussen].
At the same time, however, Libertarian Gubernatorial candidate Michael Munger has risen from 2-3% in July/August to a solid 6% in September [PPP].
Libertarian Senatorial candidate Chris Cole started out at 1% in June, and is now polling a steady 6% [PPP, Civitas].
[Again: DC Political Report NC page.]
So why is Bob Barr disappearing, while other candidates are rising?
Here's a thought: maybe the other candidates really are Libertarians.
Or else it's that damn Angela Keaton again.
4 comments:
Barr will not get more than 0.4 percent of the vote. He might not even get 0.2 percent of the vote.
All of the factors involved are working against Barr this November. He won't even get a majority of the usual LP voters.
As I've been predicting since June, I still expect that Barr will likely get 750-850k votes, 0.6-0.7% of the vote.
Of course, that total will be at least as much statistical noise based on name recognition as it is an indication that the voters who support him have the slightest idea what he would stand for if he stood for anything.
The main reason that I'm predicting less than .4% for Barr is that with all the heightened interest in this election and the closeness of the polls between McCain and Obama, all but the most ardent alternative candidate supporters will not vote for “the lesser of two evils”. I don’t believe that he has that many die hard supporters and neither has the LP.
I think a number of things are at factor here: disinterested McCain voters eventually came around to him as they got used to him as the nominee and as he chose Sarah Palin, who is of a more libertarian-esque bent than McCain has ever shown (i.e. actually cutting budgets, not very libertarian but more than McC has ever done).
The more I've seen of Obama, the less I've liked him, and others probably felt the same way and wanted to vote against him.
At least in NC, as the state has gotten closer, Barr's numbers have probably gone down in tandem. People want to decide in a close race, not vote for a third party.
Munger has appeared in a few debates and gotten more press coverage than he was getting in the spring and summer. Same for Barkley.
Then of course, there's the fact that Ron Paul didn't endorse Barr. A lot of people went to Baldwin after that.
None of this is good for Barr, though. It will be sad if the LP doesn't get their usual number of votes with a better-known candidate, truly sad.
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