The announcement was official today, although is was a badly kept secret the final 24 hours: former goobernor John Kitzhaber will indeed run for a third (non-consecutive) term as Beav-Guv.
And just as quickly, the "listening tour" of potential Dem hopeful Brian Clem has gone on pause:
State Representative Brian Clem of Salem will announce his decision on whether he will run for Governor of Oregon this Thursday, September 3, in Portland. Rep. Clem has been conducting a statewide listening tour as he explores running for Governor, visiting communities across the state, sharing his vision for Oregon's future and hearing from everyday Oregonians how they feel we can best move our state forward.
He'll be dropping word (almost literally) from the third floor terrace of the Ecotrust Building in NW PDX, tomorrow at 10 AM if you like your race withdrawal announcements live and in living color. Is it 100% positive that Clem--who had already dropped some broad hints he wouldn't run if Kitz did--will be retrieving his hat from halfway inside the ring, where it's been while he crisscrossed the state listening? Of course not, but I'll buy you a Voodoo Donut if he stays in the race. I think you'll see the field clear with the exception of Bill Bradbury--who, by the way, also made some news by hiring Jeremy Wright as his campaign manager, albeit before actually formally announcing his run. Timing, schmiming! And finally, if you're starving for benchmark data on which to base the race the rest of the way, Survey USA did a run of favorability tests on various potential candidates, and just released them (h/t Blue O). Count me among those in the camp who find the results interesting, but not terribly instructive yet this far out--except that Alley and Bradbury need to learn how to open a bottle with their fingernails, or something, so they can acquaint themselves with the electorate.
A reader reminded me that there is now polling out on our new President and Senator in Oregon to go with regular updates on our current Upper Houser and Goobernor. I'm glad he reminded me, because they've been out for almost three weeks now--and while I'm not denying any existed, I sure can't find any mention of the results as published by Survey USA on March 27th.
Regular LO readers will recognize the formats; they're the same questions repeated generally every month for the Governor and Senate offices in the state, as well as the President. They're not very good for embedding, because the crosstabs are long and the simple pie chart is not interesting. But I'll link them, and you can peruse them to your heart's content.
We'll start with President Obama, who won handily with 57% of the vote in Oregon, not shabby but not among his best states, either (Washington gave him 58% for instance). We'll call his support solid, at least in late March: he currently has a 62% job approval rating, with just 31% dissenting. Two thirds of women approve, as do two thirds of young voters.
Even Republicans in Oregon are relatively hip to Obama; he has a 30% approval rating with self-identified GOPers. Indies are favorable at 56%, but are notably warier than Democrats. Liberals in particular are ga-ga, 97% approve. (As a fairly left liberal I'd have to say boiled into a single answer I'd respond with "approve" as well, but I feel definite sympathy with the 2%--especially on the handling of Wall Street and Bush torture.) Moderates approve at a 65% clip, and his appeal is essentially the same whether you answered in Portland or anywhere else in the state.
So the honeymoon's still on in Oregon for BO; he won the state easily and has retained some new admirers it seems. In the face of a severe state recession it will be interesting to see how long that approval lasts at 60%+ levels.
I frankly think they're still behind the curve a bit, given the spate of recent polling showing Merkley slightly on top, but Congressional Quarterly has finally rescinded its analysis that Gordon Smith was nominally favored, and labeled the tight race with its most competitive category, No Clear Favorite:
Despite attempts to link himself with high-profile Democrats, Republican Gordon H. Smith is facing an increasingly difficult battle for votes in the highly competitive Oregon Senate race.
Due to Smith’s perceived challenges, continued Democratic growth in the state of Oregon and Smith’s failure to gain a strong lead in recent polls, CQ Politics is changing the rating of the race from Leans Republican to No Clear Favorite, our most competitive category.
“It’s really a toss up right now,” political scientist Robert Eisinger of Lewis & Clark College in Portland told CQ Politics.
Do you approve or disapprove of the job Gordon Smith is doing as United States Senator?
Approve 38%
Disapprove 56%
Not Sure 6%
No one has a better handle on Senate approval than Survey USA. They do it monthly, although strangely they semed to have taken this summer off, not reporting in June or July (these calls were done in mid-August). And in over three years of (mostly) monthly polling, Smith has never been anywhere NEAR this low. As you can see from the tracking graph, it goes all the way back to May of 2005, and the next-worst rating is 45% approval, recorded with the last prior sample, May of this year. Smith has flirted with the mid 40s before, but for the most part it has hovered in the low 50s, with dips right at 50%.
So this is a five month sagging of Smith's approvals, from 50-40 (+10) in April, to the first-ever negative approval at -2 (45-47), following three months later by this whopping -18 ratio, a stunning twenty-eight point drop in four months, over three surveys. Perhaps this poll is noise, and there's further slackening from May's narrow deficit but not THAT much, or maybe it's even crawled back to the positive. But if it's not noise--if September's ratio shows a negative even in the high single digits, then he's definitely taken a major hit over the summer. Why?
One thing that I like about Survey USA is that they are interested in accountability and track record, and make an effort to go back after election contests are over to see how they (and other pollsters) performed.
For the Oregon primary, here's a look at the final poll result for each of four different pollsters, compared to the actual tallies:
Clearly, PPP was right on the money here, with an impressively small gap of just 3 points between expected and actual outcomes. Only PPP was able to forecast an appropriately high number for Obama, but SUSA actually did a better job with Hillary's total. As many observers have indicated, ARG and Suffolk are best ignored; their numbers are terrible predictors.
So like Progressive Insurance, SUSA has compared the pollsters and printed the results even when theirs were not the most accurate. Kudos to them.
One other note: also released during that time was the Hibbitts poll, which had Obama winning by 20% at 55-35. The margin is close, and you could ascribe the undersell of both candidate figures to non-pushed undecideds, so perhaps we'd put this one just ahead of SUSA and behind PPP.
Updating the previous "breaking post," showing Survey USA's Presidential primary numbers in Oregon that have Barack Obama leading Hillary Clinton 55-42, there is another result out just now from Public Policy Polling. That poll shows Obama leading 58-39, It, like SUSA, is a robopoll, meaning the interviews were conducted by computer interviewers rather than people. PPP does far more calling, however, yielding a Democratic sample of over 1,200 likely voters with just a 2.7% margin for error. Here's the company's blurb:
Barack Obama is likely to win a dominant victory tomorrow in Oregon. PPP has repeatedly found similarities between Wisconsin and Oregon in its polling of the two states. Both times polling more than two weeks out tended to show Obama with a lead in the single digits. A week out his lead moved into the lower double digits. And now it's in the upper double digits. Oregon is also the only state besides Wisconsin where we've found the war as an issue on par with the economy, and that works to Obama's advantage as well.
Given how many people have already voted and how strongly they're going for Obama, there's a decent chance he's already won the primary based on the ballots already filled out. 74% of respondents said they had already voted, and among them Obama has a 60-39 advantage.
Obama leads 50-43 with women, pretty much cutting off any hope for Clinton, while leading 63-32 with men. Clinton leads senior citizens, while Obama has the advantage across the rest of the age groups.
As with SUSA, that "turned in ballot" figure causes me concern; the record for Democratic turnout was 71.9% in 1968 (McGovern over Kennedy if I recall right), and it doesn't look like they screened first for likely voters, then whether they'd turned in their ballot or not--so a 74% can't really be treated as valid in my mind. Treat them all as you would without early voting, not counting ANY votes in the bag yet.
OK, I've done the Presidential poll first like a good boy, since it's, you know, a little more high profile. But you know I am DYING to tell you about the Senate result in PPP. Also, because there's a SUSA Pres poll out today, I'm pretty sure there will be a Senate result too--but KATU pays for them and keeps an embargo until they do their evening newscast, so I expect we'll see something from them then.
This latest pollin the Oregon Senate race went into the field rather quietly by KATU/SUSA, apparently--the word was just internal calling, that I'd heard. And it went in quick, just 3 days in the field at the start of this week. But machines never sleep, and the results for both President and Senate went up today.
The Presidential race remains static, Obama -2 and Clinton +2. That's how stable it is, that Obama has hit his curb appeal nadir and is still brushing the dust off his shoulder. The movement is well within the error, although it's very possible there is a slight hardening against Obama. Two things that stick out are a shortage of women compared to the way the primaries have beem coming out across the country; and the 18-34 vote that seems to underestimatie their likely share as well. The previous poll gave the latter group 21% of the sample, compared to 15% now. The experience of other states, plus high Democratic registration and high registration by the Obama campaign, suggests larger groups of young people will actually cast ballots. Among them, he wins handily.
And in the Senate...
The Merkley Mortgage Money (well, the money spent before that, but that phrasing's not as colorful) appears to have taken advantage of a largely dead TV airspace and brought their numbers to near parity, or parity within the margin at 3.9% (4/4 results):
Novick 30 (23)
Merkley 28 (11)
Neville 8 (12)
You'll notice a rather big jump for Jeff Merkley there. Novick has made solid gains from the undecided and peelaway from the other four candidates, but Merkley definitely swallowed up the lion's share of those groups--amounting to an additional 14% of the electorate from last time--between the beginning of the month and the end of it.
We know the pollster is reputable and has a strong relative accuracy record, so unlike others we shall not impugn the legitimacy of a poll based on how favorable it is to one's own interest. You can see where gaps in the sample are, that don't look like primaries elsewhere, but I don't see the numbers as all that unrealistic. I think Novick maintaining a slight lead looks about right internally speaking, but externally I think it's missing the influence of two groups that stand to greatly impact both races.
There was a lot of attention focused on Survey USA in Oregon recently, over the omission of John Edwards from general election trial heat pairs paid for by KATU Portland (eg, Clinton vs McCain, Obama vs Romney, etc.). Now, with the hopes of Edwards' campaign hanging on slim SC odds, the debate over when to jettison an underperforming candidate has become much more academic. But it does raise the important academic question of what influence the polling industry can have on media framing of the horse races, which in turn can influence those races.
Another, more general poll of Oregon was released late last week from SUSA and KATU TV, this time focused on what folks are looking for as they think about selecting a President. There was no ambiguity; Oregonians want change, change change:
In general, how important is the issue of "change" to you in the 2008 presidential election? Very important? Somewhat important? Not very important? Or not at all important?
58% Very 24% Somewhat 13% Not Very 4% Not At All 0% Not Sure
82% focused on change, almost 6 in 10 totally amped for it. Don't believe me? Look how they rate themselves on a scale of 1 to 10:
Using a scale of 1-10, where 10 means it's the most important thing to change, and 1 means it isn't important at all... how important is it that there be a change in leadership in Washington? 19% 1 2% 2 2% 3 2% 4 7% 5 2% 6 4% 7 7% 8 14% 9 41% 10
Note the 19% hardcore Bush supporters, one has to figure. The McCain "100 Years in Iraq" backer. The Guiliani "They Bombed Us" supporters. Those guys. At the other end of the spectrum, a whopping 41% pinned the scale on the importance of change. Overall, 56% said their desire for change was very hot, and the average answer was 7.1, pretty high for these kinds of things--especially given 20% deadweight at the bottom.
You can see the breakdowns by issue where "change" is wanted by clicking the link; all of them average over 6. The bottom line is very simple: Oregonians can't wait for something new in the White House.
Does this translate into an advantage for anyone in particular? I think it means if Oregon has a chance to cast a relevant vote for nominee in May, the current environment favors Obama, the higher risk-reward candidate. The greater the sentiment for change, the greater the likelihood that the electorate will take a chance on someone who looks fresh and capable of capturing that feeling of positive change. Maybe Clinton can convince folks she offers positive change, but she's by no means fresh.
Could this environment for President affect Congressional or state races? I think the mood among Oregonians has the potential to impact the Senate primary, because if ever there were an election where Novick's message and style will resonate, it is this one. That's not to guarantee him a winning advantage; often in a change election if there is a "safe change" option, that choice may favor both emotional impulses without taking a chance on the "ballsy change" candidate. But in a climate ripe for change, the candidate who captivates and energizes best can often create a wave that overwhelms the comfortable but run of the mill.
I also think this offers John Kroger an opportunity to make a case to be heard in the Attorney General's race; his message is one of strong and focused change. Greg Macpherson is pushing more of a homespun, same-as-it-ever-was kind of vibe, and while it offers that same comfort as above, it may strike many voters as letting the issues pass you by while you sip tea and act courtly. One place I don't see it having an impact is the Secretary of State race; all four candidates offer some brand of Democratic Senator. There's no useful distinction for their campaigns in my mind, except that Kate Brown looks like a money steamroller.
And finally, let's not forget that a change-oriented electorate who is coming out to vote for a fresh President, will be less inclined to circle the oval for Same old Smith as they scan downticket. Out with the old, Gordo!
62 % In Los Angeles Say Daily Routine Affected by Rain
With the problems Southern California is having with recent rain, KABC-TV in Los Angeles wanted to ask its viewers how the forecasted rain would affect their daily routine.
20% said the rain would affect their daily routine a lot.
42% say their routine will be affected a little.
37% said the rain will not affect their daily routine at all.
I know for myself, rain TOTALLY changes my routine. I put on a jacket. But don't worry, Californians--we change our routines based on the sun: we change the signs at the borders that say "X Days Since The Sun Shone on Oregon This Winter," back to zero. Some years, we don't even have to bother.
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