President Obama is in New Jersey tonight for one final campaign appearance with Gov. Jon Corzine (see Obama’s speech here). But the polls continue to shed little light on just who’s in the driver’s seat going into Tuesday night. Of the last four released, all on Friday, each candidate leads in two.
Christie’s collapse over the last month and the relentlessly bad series of news cycles he’s had had gotten me used to thinking that Corzine was going to win this one. But the truth is these polls just give no reason to think this isn’t a coin toss. And for all the bad news, Christie’s still standing. And really no worse than tied. I’m slightly less confident of Corzine’s ability to pull this one out than I was a few days ago, though I really can’t point to any concrete reason or number to support that slight shift in impression.
It seems to me that you’ve got two contending factors — either of which could be the key to understanding the results of Tuesday night.
First, I’ve seen various different explanations of the phenomenon, and various people questioning whether the evidence for it is even there. But New Jersey Dems do seem regularly to outperform the polls of the state. If that’s true, obviously it could be Corzine by several points. For what it’s worth, the best interpretation I’ve seen of the phenomenon is that polls don’t seem to pick up the Dems’ organizational advantage on the ground in the big population centers, though why pollsters wouldn’t have compensated for this over time is really not clear.
Second, there’s the rule of thumb that undecideds break against the incumbent. He or she is the one you know. And if nothing has gotten you to support them to date, you’re just not going to do it. This unpredictability is heightened by the number of voters supporting the independent candidate Daggett. The most recent polls seem to show Daggett’s support diminishing as voters go toward the two major candidates. So it’s conceivable that either Christie or Corzine could win by a significant margin, if Daggett’s supporters break decisively for one or the other.
