Monday, November 02, 2009

HORSERACE

Some Big Fat Momentum In New Jersey?

I've been chewing over this morning's Quinnipiac poll, showing a rather sudden reversal from the Quinnipiac poll that came out last week.

On Wednesday morning, Quinnipiac University released a poll that put incumbent Democrat Jon Corzine up by 5 percentage points over Republican Chris Christie. While a Corzine lead is certainly plausible, a few things about the poll seemed a bit odd — it was done over seven days, and the sample was 40 percent Democrat and 25 percent Republican.

This morning, Quinnipiac releases a poll showing Christie up 2. (If this were basketball or football, we would suspect the referee of offering a "make-up call" to counteract an earlier botched call.) Interestingly, Christie retains his 15-percentage-point margin among independents. If that occurs on Election Day, it's really tough to see Corzine winning - he would need a lot of Democrats to turn out.

It comes on the heels of the PPP poll showing Christie up 6.

Is there real momentum for Christie in New Jersey? Republicans in the state had been predicting this for a while - that as Election Day got closer, supporters of independent Chris Daggett would realize he would be lucky to get much past 10 percent, and that the real options were four more years of Corzine or Christie.

11/02 09:35 AMShare