A new Pew poll released yesterday found the election race between President Barack Obama and Republican nominee Mitt Romney is too close to call, with each candidate on 47%. The poll also revealed the following key strength and weaknesses of the campaigns so far.
More Republican voters will vote:
Over three quarters (76%) of Republican voters said they would cast their vote on November 6th compared with only 62% of Democrat voters. A gap of that size should be concerning to the Democrat campaign as the party that is more energised will usually end up winning the election.
Obama still has the “connection” edge:
As was in the last election, President Obama still has the edge when it comes to connecting to the voters. Of those sampled, 59% said they felt Obama connects better to the “ordinary” American, while 31% said Romney connected better.
However, this is not such a big victory for President Obama as the 28-point gap is dramatically smaller than the 43% gap that he enjoyed in mid-September.
Romney is the “ideas” man:
Despite Democrat attempts to show Romney as having nothing new to offer, voters (according to the Pew poll) didn’t seem to see it that way. In terms of new, different and better ideas, 46% of voters said Romney was the better candidate. Meanwhile, President Obama only recorded 41% for that particular attribute. But when the sample is reduced to only the swing voters, the gap grows to 16-points.
An overblown gender gap?:
Despite his binders full of women gaffe, Romney is losing on the female vote by only six-points, according to Pew poll data.
If he managed to keep that gap till the election, Romney would lose the gender gap by less than half the gap that John McCain lost by in 2008 (McCain lost the female vote by 13-points). Also, if Romney kept the gap to just six-points, it would be the narrowest loss by a Republican candidate among women in more than 20 years.