The new survey of the New Jersey gubernatorial by Public Policy Polling (D) finds Republican Chris Christie leading Democratic Gov. Jon Corzine — with independent Chris Daggett possibly playing spoiler against Corzine.
The numbers: Christie 42%, Corzine 38%, and Daggett 13%, with a 3.9% margin of error. Two weeks ago, Christie was ahead in PPP’s survey by 40%-39%-13%.
The internals of the poll suggest that Daggett may actually be siphoning more voters from Corzine right now than from Christie — a big change from two weeks ago. In the latest poll, 42% of the present pool of Daggett-supporters list Corzine as their second choice, compared to 32% for Christie. By contrast, Daggett-backers in the last poll went 48%-34% for Christie on second choices. A big caveat is that the margins of error are very large in these sub-samples, at ±10.6% this week and ±11.4% two weeks ago, but it is an interesting data point.
From the pollster’s analysis: “The Daggett voters seem to be pretty volatile so if they go back to the Corzine camp he’ll have a good shot of pulling it out. The campaign that does the better job of turning out its voters will win.”
