Delaware Political Polling!
We don’t get much polling focused on Delaware, so this might be interesting. The University of Delaware’s Center for Political Communication commissioned a poll conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates that finds that AG Beau Biden is the most popular politician in Delaware. He leads the pack with 64.2% favorability– followed up by Governor Markell at 62.1%, Senator Carper at 61.3%, Representative Carney at 47.1%, Senator Coons at 47% and Chip Flowers at 28.4%.
The NJ blog post that talks about this does not provide any links to either a polling summary or its crosstabs, so I guess a deeper look isn’t on for the polling junkies among us. But I wonder why Matt Denn wasn’t included here?
It’s interesting to me how these results fall into their own groupings — Biden, Markell and Carper in the top tier; Carney and Coons in the middle tier and Flowers in the bottom tier. Flowers seems to not have much name or track record recognition, which is why he is in the bottom tier. Carney and Coons have slightly more people reporting that they don’t know them or can’t rate them than the top tier — and I wonder how much of their unfavoribility is attached to the recent shutdown. Where most of Congress’ unfavorability ratings took a hit. And I wonder how much of Biden’s favorability isn’t residual sympathy for his recent health problems.
UD is hosting an event on 30 October to specifically discuss this poll, so maybe more information will be available then.
A better explanation could be found by concentrating on the percentages of people who Never Heard of or Can’t Rate. If 10% of those polled never heard of Tom Carper, and a like percentage can’t rate him, the man who has won more elections than any Delawarean has, the truth may be in the fact that 1 out of 5 polled have no idea who anyone is or what they do. If that is the case, maybe Beau’s high favorables are not because of his health scare, why would people who do not know who these people are know of someone’s health issues? Perhaps many respondents confused Beau with his dad. Many who are ignornant of who their elected officials are, vote only in a presidential election or not at all. The important statistics are the “unfavorables”. All of these elected officials had unfavorables at 23% (Coons) or lower. Chip Flowers, unknown to many, also has the lowest unfavorables (12%) even with all the bad press.
The fact that they did not poll on Matt Denn ( elected to statewide office three times and a likely candidate for Governor) makes the results meaningless, other than for those who were polled about who can conclude that each can win a statewide election if they are well-funded.
I also wish they had polled on Tom Wagner, who will have a difficult race next year, and on Karen Stewart, who I understand is also a statewide elected official.
It really boggles my mind that no one has announced a primary against Chip.
A poll run by an ignoramus, apparently. No Denn or Gordon?
hmm- maybe nobody has the energy to do it because they don’t eat enough at breakfast.
Mitch is right — no Denn, Wagner or Stewart is odd for this kind of poll. Wonder if there is more in the final document? Also, as I look at this graph closer, it looks like they may have asked for opinions of “very favorable, mostly favorable, mostly unfavorable, very unfavorable” and those breakdowns have been combined in the chart. I’d like to see the specific breakdown.
The fact that Denn, Wagner, or Stewart was not on this list, does not make it a credible list. Wagner will have a very difficult race next year, and it would have been very interesting to see just where he stands in the initial polling.