Day By Day

Thursday, May 11, 2006

Pennsylvania Politics -- Santorum's Woes

The headline says "Santorum Still Slipping" but that's not really right. The problem for Santorum is that he, at least in the Quinnipiac polls, has not made any headway in the past year.

The poll shows Bob Casey leading Rick Santorum by 49-36 percent with only 12 percent undecided. The brightest ray of hope for Santorum is the fact that three out of ten voters who expressed a preference in the poll said that they might still change their vote. Added to the 12 percent undecided this means that about a quarter of the total vote is still up for grabs.

But over the course of the past year Santorum's ratings have not improved. If anything they have gotten worse. Bad news for Rickey.

There is also bad news when Democrats are polled separately. Santorum had hoped that liberal challengers might dent Casey's support. Casey is, after all, a center right Republican in everything but party identification. He is substantially to the right of Arlen Specter. But that is not showing up in the polls.

Santorum can perhaps find comfort in the fact that most voters have not really paid much attention to the race yet. Nearly half, 46 percent, say that they don't really know enough about Casey to make a solid judgment on him.

So there is still time to change the dynamics, but Rickey needs to start showing some progress. Other polling organizations on which I have reported do show some substantial narrowing of the race, but the Quinnipiac numbers hold no comfort for Rickey.

Read the poll summary here.

RELATED:

The IssuesPA/Pew--Pennsylvania Economy League released a poll showing that Swann is only one point behind Rendell in hard core support. I'm not sure what that means. Read about it here.

No comments: