With all the talk about the search by very conservative Republican voters for an anybody-but-Romney choice — and they’ve gone through quite a few possibilities on that question, such as Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, and possibly now Herman Cain — another question ought to be asked: Who are the folks that like Romney?
TPM asked two different pollsters — and got two different kinds of answers. (Or maybe even three.)
A key problem here, of course, is the nature of the multi-candidate race. Romney is, of course, one of many candidates in the race, so the best question that can be asked is only which demographic groups he performs better amongst, than with voters as a whole.
But even this would not necessarily mean those groups as a whole like Romney (or that groups where he is under-performing like some other candidate who is currently leading for them) — simply that in the multi-candidate race, this is how the chips currently fall.
Furthermore, demographic subsets of polls always have very wide margins of error. Thus, repeating patterns can sometimes be found, but even then there remains some doubt.
“Well, that’s a problem because your n [the sample size of a poll] is so small, and you’ve got so many candidates dividing it, you have a bit of a problem,” said Peter A. Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute, in an interview with TPM.
Despite his overall statistical caution though, Brown does think there is enough of a pattern to say that Romney has performed better among women Republican voters, than among men. “The gender stuff, we’ve seen in a number of places and I’m comfortable saying that Romney does slightly better among women Republicans, than he does among men.
“You can do gender, but the other stuff’s tough,” Brown also added, explaining the problem of sub-groups in poll: “So if you have an 800-person sample, and Romney’s getting 25 percent, that means he’s getting 200 votes among the 800.”
On the other hand, spokesman Tom Jensen of Public Policy Polling, the Democratic robo-polling that has done a plethora of state and national polls, was confident enough to spot a regional pattern for Romney’s popularity in the firm’s polling: The West, and New England.
“We’ve always found Romney doing strongest in California, Nevada and New Mexico, and obviously he’s gonna do well in New England,” said Jensen, “not just because he’s from New England, but because he tends to do stronger in states with more moderate Republican voters.”
Jensen also believes that Romney does better among older Republicans.
“I think he’s going to do much better with a really old electorate – and that’s part of why he’s doing so well in New Hampshire, even as he’s had trouble in other places,” said Jensen.
“I think younger voters are looking for a more exciting candidate – and there’s obviously nothing exciting about Romney. And older voters are looking for someone more steady — if you’re looking for someone steady in the Republican field, it’s clearly Mitt Romney. And also to the extent that there are more centrist voters in the Republican party, they tend to be older, so it’s sort of conflating groups.”
