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North Carolina Democratic Primary Poll Predictions: Is Obama Poised To Lose, Barely Survive Or Win By Double Digits?


May 5, 2008 by

Nowhere do you experience the agony and ecstasy of following political polling results more than in the scientific tea-leaf readings now coming out of North Carolina. Each makes sense when you read them.

Here are two of the latest.

1. WTVD in North Carolina sees a nail-biter:

On the eve of the North Carolina Democratic Primary, with 25% of votes already cast, Barack Obama has no breathing room in his hope to defeat Hillary Clinton in popular votes.

According to SurveyUSA’s 8th and final tracking poll, conducted exclusively for ABC11 Eyewitness News, on the final day of the fiercely fought campaign, Senator Barack Obama holds on with 50% of the vote to Senator Hillary Clinton’s 45% of those polled.
There is no foreseeable outcome in North Carolina, regardless of which candidate wins the popular vote, where one candidate collects significantly more convention delegates than the other.

AND

2. FiveThirdyEight.com predicts it’ll be Obama by double-digits.

In Pennsylvania and Indiana, the previous times that we conducted this exercise, the results from our regression model were closely in line with the composite polling averages in those states. In North Carolina, however, while most polls show a tightening, single-digit race, our model steadfastly forecasts a solid, double-digit victory for Barack Obama.

If you’ll recall, the way that I produce these projections is to rely purely on demographic data from previous primaries. So the unstated assumption is this: if voters in North Carolina behave like demographically-aligned voters in other states, this is about what we should expect. On the other hand, if something has changed in the way that some groups of voters view the candidates — our model may be inaccurate.

There does appear to me to be some evidence that Hillary Clinton is overperforming the position she has generally held throughout most of the recent primaries. But there is also some strong evidence that the current polling in North Carolina may be understating Barack Obama’s support in that state.

Read it in its entirety since it’s a detailed analysis.

Choose the poll that fits your political bias and believe it, and pooh-pooh the other one.

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2 Comments

  1. mlhradio
    May 5, 2008 | 10:50 pm

    Opinions and predictions have been all over the board – I've heard plenty of perfectly reasonable experts express the widest range of opinions possible on Indiana and North Carolina — just like they did two weeks ago.

    Honestly, this election has been so totally crazy, I'm prepared for *any* result, from a Clinton stunner to an Obama blow-out. At this time 24 hours from now, we'll all be glued to our TV sets watching the spin doctors do their dirty work.

    About the only thing that I *know* for absolute certain is this: No matter what the result, the Clintons will be doing their absolute hardest to spin the win/loss/tie to their advantage. And, of course, the Obama campaign will be doing the exact same thing. And the campaign moves on to West Virginia and Kentucky and Oregon, (although with less on-ground intensity as the fight shifts to the superdelegates and MI/FL controversy, since the number of delegates available in the back rooms outweighs all the remaining pledge delegate races, as MSNBC pointed out).

    It's not so much *what* the results out of North Carolina and Indiana are. Win, lose, tie — who cares? What matters is how hard you can spin those results to yoru advantage.

    (PS My prediction, for what it's worth: Clinton by 12 in Indiana, Obama by 5 in North Carolina, both of which are more Obama-pessimistic than most of the pundits are predicting. And I'm totally prepared to be completely wrong.)

  2. elrod
    May 5, 2008 | 11:37 pm

    Early votes are over 40% black in NC. Most polls expect blacks to be 33% of total votes at most. That's why the polls are underestimating Obama in the South.

    You could even take the SUSA number for Hillary and give all undecideds to Obama and have him win by 10 points.