Poll: Webb-Allen Tied

This is great news for Jim Webb. Latest Mason-Dixon poll done for McClatchy newspapers has the race tied. With only six weeks to go, the incumbent only has 43% of the vote, the same as Jim Webb. Twelve percent are undecided, and this group usually breaks overwhelmingly for the challenger.

Comments

[CR UVa]

How is the inconsistency of this poll when compared to others explained?

[Bob]

What inconsistency?

[Jane Oldham]

Perhaps he means ALL the other polls that show Allen ahead, including this one, more recent than Mason Dixon:
SurveryUSA, September 26 through 28:
Allen 50
Webb 44

http://www.surveyusa.com/client/PollReport.aspx?g=ecfbf467-5bcc-4fd5-bf7e-aab7cea55e56

[Kris Amundson]

Others have noted previously, but Mason-Dixon is generally the most Republican friendly poll. That said, it is also usually the most accurate for Virginia races. (I am usually tearing my hair out at M-D polls this time of year.)

[Bob]

Polls are rarely unanimous. But if the best Allen has is 50%, it still spells trouble as most of the undecideds will likely go to Webb. The only poll that matters, of course, is in November. This will probably come down to how successful Allen is in producing ads attacking Webb vs. how many more people come forward to reveal Allen's behavior.

One thing for sure is that Allen will continue to try to say the charges against him are lies or the indescretions of youth or "of another time." But he was not a child, but a 22 year-old in college, and this was the 1970s, when racial slurs and nooses where as taboo as they are today.

Meanwhile, Webb needs to decide whether to attack Allen for some of these "indescretions" or attack him on the issues of Iraq and the economic challenges of the middle class. I'd favor the latter, but either way, the DSCC will need to open their wallets.

[jeff]

I don't know where Bob was in the '70s, but the use of a racial slur was pretty much common in both California, where I grew up...and in Virginia where I came to in 1971.
I don't know how the noose became a racial matter. We used to make them all the time, and it was a cowboy thing in S. Calif.

Allen should take this election, most Virginian's know him for his accomplishments in the Commonwealth...and they know a smear campaign when they see one.

[Bob]

Jeff, I was at a southern university in the late 60s and the use of "nigger" may have been common among a lot of southerns -- and northerners, for that matter -- but they didn't use it in public speech and not in private speech unless they were bigots. It was used not casually as a term for black people. Trying to sugegst that the word was used casually as an acceptable alternative word for black people is just plain wrong.

So if Allen used it repeatedly, he was clearly sending the message that he was a bigot.

[Brian]

For what it's worth, here's the RCP page on the Allen-Webb race. Note the Intrade numbers - very bad news for Webb.

[Bob]

Not sure that InTrade is any more reliable than the polls, but they aren't good numbers. Somehow, I can't believe this will be a 60-40 race.

[Brian]

Futures markets like Intrade tend to be notably more accurate than polls. Intrade not only got the '04 Presidential Election right, but nailed EVERY state.

The 60-38 number is not an indicator of what the distribution of the vote will be. It roughly translates into a sixty percent chance that Allen will win, by whatever margin.

[Chris]

Allen keeps claiming that bringing up his racist past & present is somehow a smear campaign. Who is smearing whom?Is smearing a person kinda like singling out a brown-skin young man among a throng white by using a racial slur. Could one consider it a smear when some yahoo puts a dead deer head in your mailbox? How about this, instead of smearing George Felix Allen, why not ask him why he never served in the military?

One last thing, Webb slaughtered that stupid punk in the LWV debate tonight. Virginia deserves better than George Felix Allen