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Poll: McDonnell Still Ahead In Virginia
VA-GOV Candidates Creigh Deeds (D) and Bob McDonnell (R)
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The new Rasmussen poll of Virginia finds Republican Bob McDonnell continuing to hold a solid lead over Democrat Creigh Deeds in the Virginia gubernatorial race.
The numbers: McDonnell 50%, Deeds 43%, with a ±4% margin of error. This has not significantly changed from two weeks ago, when McDonnell was ahead 51%-42%.
The pollster's analysis finds that McDonnell has recovered from controversies surrounding his hard-right grad school thesis, which denounced working women -- but also that the potential still exists for it to be a problem: "Concern about the thesis has risen again, however. Fifty-five percent (55%) of voters now say it is at least somewhat important in determining how they will vote. That's up five points from the two previous surveys on the race."
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rwc
October 13, 2009 7:03 PM
Don't trust Rasmussen. They have a GOP agenda. They had the last presidential race closer than it turned out to be and then pretended in the last couple of days before the election that the polls suddenly ticked in Obama's facvor so that they wouldn't look bad
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slb
October 13, 2009 8:35 PM in reply to rwc
The key thing is that it is unchanged since the last one, which means that the polls that had showed the race to be narrower, but still leaning for McDonnell are likely unchanged as well. And that is worrying, because it may be that the momentum that the Deeds campaign has been enjoying the last several weeks has slowed or stopped. Jeff Schapiro, the political analyst for the Richmond Times-Dispatch who has a Friday morning spot on public radio station WCVE in Richmond and its sister stations in Heathsville and Chase City, said this past Friday that independent women in Northern Virginia are moving toward McDonnell, which is worrisome.
Last night was their first (only?) statewide public debate; I only heard the tail end of it, but in what I heard, Deeds did not come off well. He is a poor speaker, and McDonnell is much smoother. (Or should I say slicker?)
Still, I doubt those debates have a very wide audience, and evidently, there were no fireworks the way there were in the Senate race between Allen and Webb that would give it a lot of play on the news. I'm more worried about the polling.
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