PPL IN #NJ R SO DUMB/ASLEEP “@starledger: President Obamaleads GOP nominee Mitt Romney among N.J. voters, poll showshttp://nj-ne.ws/TlNzwK”
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President Obama leads GOP nominee Mitt Romney among N.J. voters, poll shows
Published: Thursday, September 06, 2012, 6:00 AM
Marc Serota and Justin Sullivan/Getty ImagesPresidential candidates Barack Obama and Mitt Romney.President Obama leads GOP nominee Mitt Romney by seven points among likely voters in New Jersey, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released this morning.
Obama leads Romney 51 to 44 percent, leaving just four percent undecided and one percent preferring someone else.
“Gov. Mitt Romney trails President Barack Obama by seven points in blue, blue New Jersey. Is it a post-convention bounce for Romney and will the president get his own bounce this week?” said Maurice Carroll, director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute.
Nevertheless, Carroll said “The votes look to be locked in.”
“Almost 90 percent of Obama's New Jersey voters and more than 90 percent of Romney backers say they’ll stand by their man,” he said.
Among independent New Jersey voters, Romney leads 48 percent to 44 percent. He also leads Obama among men, whites, Protestants, Catholics and Born Again evangelical Christians. Black voters overwhelmingly prefer Obama, who also leads strongly among women and the college educated.
The poll also shows U.S. Sen. Robert Menendez with a 10 point lead over his still largely unknown opponent, state Sen. Joseph Kyrillos (R-Monmouth). Menendez has 50 percent of the vote to Kyrillos’s 40 percent.
The poll of 1,471 likely voters was conducted from August 27 to September 2 and has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.6 percentage points.
A July Quinnipiac poll showed Obama and Menendez with larger leads, but it’s not comparable to today’s because it sampled all registered voters. In today’s poll, Quinnipiac surveyed only likely voters.
The Kyrillos campaign yesterday released an internal poll that showed better numbers for the Republican. The automated poll of 746 likely voters, which was conducted by Magellan Strategies, showed Menendez leading Kyrillos by only four percentage points — 45 percent to 41 percent.
But Patrick Murray, a pollster from Monmouth University, said the poll had a “glaring issue” in that it did not ask about the presidential race, meaning it “doesn’t match up with the real world context in which actual voters are considering their choices this year.”
“All polls released by a campaign should be treated like any other piece of propaganda placed into the public debate to manipulate perceptions. Some of the claims may be true and some may not,” said Murray. “We don’t know what secret sauce’ went into the poll, so unlike other claims a candidate may make, there is no way to run this though a political fact check.”
