The traditional swing states might prove slightly less important as Virginia and North Carolina stay in the toss up column: pundits are usually quick to point out that if President Obama were to take one of those southern states there are a number of scenarios in which he could lose Ohio and Florida and still win re-election. But Ohio is still ground zero in the red state vs. blue state battle, and the President is dropping in a new Public Policy Polling (D) survey of the state.
And yet, only one GOP candidate, former Mass. Gov. Mitt Romney, ties him in a matchup, while Obama bests the rest of the field. It’s been a common tale in early presidential polling: Obama may be down in approval, yet no GOPer can really get past him in an actual matchup. But GOP candidates are getting closer, despite a lack of movement for the President. Obama’s approval rating in Ohio is virtually unchanged from PPP’s last poll of Ohio, yet Romney and businessman Herman Cain are pulling closer with him, while Texas Gov. Rick Perry has fallen further back as his campaign has stumbled.
Romney and Obama are tied at 46 percent, with independent voters breaking towards Romney while both men have a solid hold on their base. Yet Obama has a nearly twenty point lead among self-described “moderate” voters, which could help to explain that while he only wins a majority of Democrats by political affiliation, he can still piece together enough support in the state to get only four points shy of the 50 percent mark generally.
Cain — the GOP frontrunner of the moment — doesn’t pull more of the middle, and Obama leads him 48 – 45 in a matchup. Cain cedes more moderate voters, which seems to cost him a tie with Obama, as the splits among Democrats and Republicans from the Obama-Romney matchup are very similar.
But the toplines are essentially misleading, PPP writes, as the President’s numbers make the race too close for comfort and would lead to a loss up if the election were held tomorrow. From their report:
A head to head between Obama and Romney would be a tie at this point, with each candidate getting 46%. Those numbers are worse for Obama than they appear to be on the surface though- just 18% of the undecided voters approve of the job he’s doing. When those folks make up their minds they’re not very likely to end up in Obama’s camp. Romney has an 11 point advantage with independents and pulls 12% of the Democratic vote while losing only 4% of Republicans to Obama.
“If the election was today Barack Obama would lose to Mitt Romney in Ohio,” said Dean Debnam, President of Public Policy Polling said in a release. “The undecideds are pretty much all unhappy with the President’s performance.”
The PPP poll used 581 automated telephone interviews with registered Ohio voters conducted from October 13th to the 16th. The survey has a sampling error of 4.1 percent.
