The polls have been coming hot and heavy in New Jersey, and this race is nothing but a pure tossup, with just as many polls giving a Corzine lead as a Christie lead. Last time we had anything to say about New Jersey, we were feeling a little cocky after Quinnipiac had given Jon Corzine a 5-point lead last Wednesday. Rather than go into extreme detail about every bump and dip in the roller coaster ride since then, let’s just recap everything that’s been released in the last half a week, from oldest to newest:
| Pollster | Dates | Corzine (D) | Christie (R) | Daggett (I) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Democracy Corps | 10/27-28 | 43 | 38 | 12 |
| Research 2000 | 10/26-28 | 41 | 42 | 14 |
| SurveyUSA | 10/26-28 | 43 | 43 | 11 |
| FDU Public Mind | 10/22-28 | 39 | 41 | 14 |
| Stockton | 10/27-29 | 40 | 39 | 14 |
| Neighborhood (R) | 10/27-29 | 35 | 42 | 8 |
| Rasmussen | 10/29 | 43 | 46 | 8 |
| YouGov | 10/27-30 | 43 | 41 | 8 |
| Monmouth | 10/28-30 | 42 | 43 | 8 |
| PPP | 10/31-11/1 | 41 | 47 | 11 |
| Quinnipiac | 10/27-11/1 | 40 | 42 | 12 |
| SurveyUSA | 10/30-11/1 | 42 | 45 | 10 |
| Monmouth | 10/31-11/1 | 43 | 41 | 8 |
| Democracy Corps | 10/29-11/1 | 41 | 36 | 14 |
Rather than try to convince you there’s a pattern here, I’ll merely direct you to the Pollster.com regression lines, which, as of this minute, pegs the race at precisely 42.0% Corzine, 42.0% Christie, and 10.1% Daggett (with a notable downtick in Daggett’s trendline, as many recent polls have him falling back into the single-digits, and a somewhat less noticeable Christie uptick — his red line gets overlapped by Corzine’s blue line). There initially seemed to be a bit of a Corzine swoon over the weekend (as seen in the Corzine drops in Quinnipiac and SurveyUSA), but the Monmouth and Democracy Corps polls that just rolled in don’t seem to be bear that out. And SurveyUSA‘s writeup of their most recent poll points to what you may be thinking: there may be a weekend sample selection bias thing going on here, with last weekend being a particularly busy one for younger people, between Halloween and the state being torn apart, brother against brother, by the World Series (I’m sure you remember that Barack Obama’s polling numbers used to fall off over the weekend as we were racing to the end a year ago). Bottom line: this race is as tossuppy as a tossup has ever been tossed.
RaceTracker: NJ-Gov
The suspects are:
YouGov/Polimetrix (last poll 10/30)
Rasmussen (last poll 10/29)
Zogby (last poll 10/29)
Neighborhood (R) (last poll 10/29)
Daily Kos (last poll 10/28)
Fairleigh Dickinson (last poll 10/28)
Suffolk (last poll 10/25)
Rutgers-Eagleton (last poll 10/20)
New York Times (last poll 10/14)
Penn Shoen (last poll 10/5)
killing among the already-voted 50-38 but still down overall. Dem early voting operations really seem to have improved in recent years.
Polling overload! Props for sorting through all that; the overabundance of numbers makes me want to gouge out my eyeballs…which would make me sad, because I’m really hoping to see John King whip out the SMART Board again tomorrow night.
In every poll, including Democracy Corps, except the most accurate in the state IMO.
that no matter how bad NJ voters think Corzine is, Christie would be 10 times worse. It isn’t worth it just because they are angry at Corzine. The thing New Jersey need is a corrupt North East version of Hailey Barbour as their governor.
Christie 48
Corzine 47
Daggett 5
I hope I’m wrong.
in the race:
http://eagletonpoll.blogspot.c…
“PPP showing Christie +6 and DemCorps showing Corzine +4 are outliers… All others show statistical tie…”