Yesterday we asked if Mike Castle was feeling some heat from Christine O’Donnell when there was suddenly a rash of Christine O’Donnell surging stories. There were stories from The Huffington Post, Daily Kos, Talking Points Memo, The Swing State Project and Michelle Malkin. The surge of interest came because the Tea Party Express announced they were going to spend a lot of money on Christine O’Donnell’s behalf (more than $0.5M), just like they did with Joe Miller in Alaska. PPP Polls looks at the comparison of Alaska to Delaware to see if Tea Partiers can pull off another miracle and take out Castle.
The arguments for:
-Lisa Murkowski’s poll numbers with Republicans back in January are far superior to where Mike Castle’s have ever been in our surveys. When we looked at Alaska in January Murkowski’s approval within her party was 77/13. By contrast our Delaware poll this month found Castle’s favorability with Republicans at only 60/25. It was 61/23 last December so it appears there’s a pretty solid quarter of the electorate ready to vote against him from day 1 that didn’t exist with Murkowski.
-The ideological composition of the Delaware and Alaska Republican electorates is actually almost identical. Intuitively you would expect Alaska’s to be far more conservative but our last Delaware poll found 58% of Republicans identifying as conservatives and 37% as moderates. Our Alaska ‘exit poll,’ which we’ll release tomorrow, found theirs at 59% conservatives and 37% moderates.
So according to PPP’s high level look there are enough conservative voters in Delaware to swing the election to O’Donnell. She just has to get them to the polls and frankly, convince them to vote for her.
The arguments against:
-Mike Castle has been elected statewide in Delaware 13 times. Lisa Murkowski had been once. It’s a lot easier to destroy someone’s image with 50%+1 of the primary electorate in a very short period of time when they’re relatively new to the scene than it is when they’ve been in statewide office for 30 years like Castle has.
-Time and money. We haven’t seen any public polling out of Delaware on the primary but it seems pretty safe to say Castle’s still up by a good amount and with only two weeks to go there’s not a lot of time to make that up. And it will probably take a much bigger investment to put a huge dent into Castle when that involves buying up Philadelphia tv time than it did in Alaska where a little money goes a long way.
-The lack of a Sarah Palin endorsement for O’Donnell. Our Alaska ‘exit poll’ actually found that Palin wasn’t as big a factor in Miller’s win as she seems to be getting credit for but there’s no doubt that would be a big help with at least some portion of the Republican electorate.
O’Donnell hasn’t had a big name endorsement and I don’t think Jim DeMint or Sarah Palin has that much influence in Delaware. The key to the Tea Party Express’s success in Alaska was a commercial where they portrayed Lisa Murkowski as a liberal.
I guess we’ll have to wait and see what kind of ad the Tea Party Express runs in Delaware. $0.5M won’t go as far in Delaware as in Alaska but an ad could get plenty of media coverage. There’s not much time to change things (the primary is in only 2 weeks) but there were a lot of undecideds in the last PPP Poll. PPP Polls also tweeted that they plan to poll Delaware again.