Conservatives might want to take comfort from this Public Policy Polling poll in Colorado, but I would advise some caution. It shows Barack Obama’s job approval at only 49%-45% positive, and freshman Senator Mark Udall (but senior senator by 16 days over appointee Michael Bennet) with 41%-46% negative job approval. By party identification the sample is 38% Republican and 36% Democratic, not too much different a balance from the the 30% Republican and 31% Democratic in the 2008 exit poll. PPP has Obama at 46% approval from Independents, lower than the 54% who voted for him according to the exit poll.
But I think something here does not quite add up. I had not heard of PPP, a Democratic firm, until the 2008 cycle, and I found their results in several states erratic, well off the general trend in some cases, varying wildly from week to week in others. And I have some doubts about the exit poll in Colorado. I see here that PPP shows Obama with 51%-42% job approval from voters 18 to 29—not all that high. But when I go to the exit poll, I see that they show 18-29s as N/A. You would think that would mean that there are too few of them to be a statistically reliable sample. But no, they are 14% of an electorate in a sample of 1,254 and the exit poll does show results for the elderly age group, which is listed as 13% of the electorate. Moreover, when you extrapolate from the available numbers what the 18-29 results must have been, in a state that voted 54%-45% for Obama, you find that young voters voted only 53%-43% for Obama, or just about the state average. (Did the exit poll people suppress these numbers because they considered them implausible?) The most pro-Obama age group here was the 45-64s, roughly the Baby Boomers.
In contrast, in most other non-Southern and many Southern states young voters were much more pro-Obama than their elders. Nationally, young voters were 66%-32% Obama, as compared to 50%-49% Obama for those 30 and over. Any plausible reasons why Colorado (and Oregon) should be so different? Well, if you remember the 1970s, you will remember that a lot of highly educated Baby Boomers moved to hip and environmentally beautiful Colorado and Oregon. They were the impetus behind the careers of liberal young Democrats like Governor Dick Lamm, Senator Gary Hart, Congresswoman Patricia Schroeder and Congressman and Senator Tim Wirth, who flourished politically in the two decades starting in 1972. In contrast, one might suggest, today’s young Coloradans and Oregonians might be disproportionately the offspring of the more conservative folks who came into those states in the 1980s and, in states which have not had huge in-migration in the 1990s or 2000s, tend to dominate the young age group.
That’s the best explanation for the numbers I can come up with. And I confess I think it’s not very plausible. But there’s some internal consistency between the exit poll and the PPP poll: Obama’s best age group in both is the Boomers (45-64s in the exit poll, 46-65s in PPP). So maybe there’s something to it. Anomalous poll numbers more often than not are an example of bad polling or an instance of the polling rule that says that one out of 20 polls is wrong. But sometimes the anomalies enable you to learn something you didn’t know before. Maybe this is one of those instances.
Of course, if that’s true, there’s limited comfort for conservatives in these numbers. They’d say something mildly encouraging about Colorado (9 electoral votes) but not about the rest of the nation.
