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W&J students find Clinton leads locally
Staff writer
Preliminary data from a poll conducted by Washington & Jefferson College political science students shows Sen. Hillary Clinton leading Sen. Barack Obama by 9 percentage points among Democratic "supervoters" in Washington County.
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The remainder, DiSarro said, are undecided. The W&J poll has a margin of error of plus or minus five points.
As of Friday, students had contacted 364 likely Democratic voters, a random sampling of 4,000 supervoters.
"A poll is a snapshot, not a prediction at all," DiSarro cautioned. "You can't predict the future."
Stating his own opinion based on the numbers he was crunching, DiSarro said of the former first lady, "I think she's going to take the area by 8 or 9 points. Whether she can take the whole state by that is another question."
Students began polling Monday, April 14, and were scheduled to continue through Monday, the eve of the primary. DiSarro's goal was to have 40 students each make about a dozen calls, contacting about 500 supervoters.
As of Friday afternoon, DiSarro had learned, "You can't do it in one week. The way the big outfits do it, they have a computer do it."
The students posed three questions, the first of which had to do with planning to vote for either Clinton or Obama on Tuesday. They also asked two questions about possible match-ups in the fall, asking voters to state a preference for Obama or McCain and Clinton or McCain.
Answers to the last two question surprised DiSarro.
"In both cases, McCain loses and loses big," DiSarro said. "We're looking at huge margins." A Clinton-McCain match-up netted 67 percent for Clinton and 16 percent for McCain, while an Obama-McCain contest garnered 60 percent for Obama and 19 percent for McCain.
"This is a conservative area," DiSarro said. "Hillary and others said Barack could not carry the day against McCain.
"Hillary Clinton is saying she is the stronger candidate, and that does not bear out in the polls. Her argument is that she does best among traditional, blue-collar Democrats, and we've got a helluva lot of traditional blue-collar Democrats in Washington County."
Of McCain, DiSarro said, "He's gotten such limited press, maybe people are just not focusing on him. That's the danger of not having a primary in your party. Nobody's covered McCain with any intensity.
"If I was working this poll for McCain, I'd say, 'We've got to get our candidate out. He's got to get into the limelight. He's being ignored.'
"Who's he running against? (Texas Congressman) Ron Paul?"
Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee also will be on the GOP ballot. Huckabee pulled out of the race March 5, too late to remove his name.
"Supervoter" is a term that's often bandied about in political circles, and DiSarro said for the purposes of obtaining polling data, he asked the elections office to provide the names of Democrats who have voted in the past three consecutive elections and primaries.
"There is no designation within the election code," said Department of State spokeswoman Rebecca Halton from Harrisburg.
"It's simply a classification used by campaigns to identify those who vote consistently in general and primary elections. A county can choose criteria on who should appear on that list. Sometimes criteria is specific to the customer's request.
"We don't have a set definition."
While those polled are classified as "supervoters," they aren't necessarily super-patient.
DiSarro said after the pollsters identified themselves as W&J students working on a research project, some voters simply hung up. Others never answered their phones.
The professor plans to have the students conduct another poll in the fall, adding Republicans and Independents to the sampling.
