Monday, June 8, 2009

Obama's Targeting Director Sees Deeds' Victory As Most Likely

Froma Q&A at FiveThirtyEight with Ken Strasma, President Obama's National Targeting Director in 2008, on tomorrow's election:
You got to know Virginia demography pretty well in 2008. Any predictions on what will happen Tuesday in the Virginia primary?

The key in Virginia as that we don’t yet know the demographics of the primary electorate. The Democratic primary electorate in VA has been changing over the last several cycles. The share of the Democratic primary vote coming from Northern Virginal more than doubled between 2001 and the 2008 presidential primary. We’ll see on Tuesday who does the best job of turning out their vote.

Most public polling is showing Deeds and Moran gaining and McAuliffe dropping, but the numbers are close enough that a good GOTV operation could make the difference for any one of the three candidates. I see the most likely outcome as a Deeds win, but McAuliffe could still win if Deeds and Moran continue to split the “non-McAuliffe” vote. If Moran’s supporters begin to defect to Deeds then there is probably no way for McAuliffe to win what would then be functionally a 2-person race against Deeds.

2 comments:

  1. Alan -- interested to know your thoughts on nls and blue va running with the VT victims bashing Deeds tonight? I am generally of the "politics ain't beanbag" school, but this seems like exploitation of the tragedy. It's not like these two are in any real sense outside the T-Mac circle; NLS' even has a video rolling out his endorsement with Terry. So the "this is a new site" defense doesn't fly with me.

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