Peter Levine

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September 21, 2010

the Project Vote survey

Today, Project Vote released a survey of the current opinions of people who voted in 2008. (They randomly sampled from a list of actual voters, which is available from official rolls, so no one in their sample inaccurately reported that he voted.) As I've written before, we ought to understand the views of the majority in the last election, rather than speculating about who will vote next time--especially since such predictions can become self-fulfilling prophesies.

Project Vote finds the following results for 2008 voters:

Approve of President Obama's job performance: 48.1% (all 2008 voters); 91.8% (African Americans); 60.8% (youth); 61.8% (low income); 10.9% (people who identify today with the Tea Party).

First-time voter? 51.5% (youth); 8.5% (all); 0.6% (Tea Partier)

More important to spend money to stimulate the economy or to reduce the budget deficit 44.8% spend v. 48.5% reduce the deficit (all); 55.5% v. 39.6% (youth); 18.8% v. 78.6% (Tea Partiers).

There are 67 items in all, most of them quite interesting. Overall, a picture emerges of the Tea Partiers as outliers in the 2008 electorate. The average voter's opinion will probably move in their direction in November, 2010. But that hasn't happened yet, and the degree to which most voters will agree with them on substantive issues remains very much to be seen.

September 21, 2010 1:13 PM | category: none

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