General Election Matchups

All the usual caveats apply about early polling, but I decided to take a look at the polls to see how a McCain-Obama race looks compared to the Bush-Kerry race in 2004. I used a recent Gallup analysis of the demographics of the McCain-Obama contest and compared them where I could to the 2004 exit polls. Here are the results:

	Bush	Kerry	Difference		McCain	Obama	Difference
Men	55	44	11		49	43	6
Women	48	51	-3		42	48	-6
65+	52	47	5		50	38	12
White	58	41	17		55	38	17
Black	11	88	-77		4	90	-86
Latino	44	53	-9		29	62	-33
HS or Less	52	47	5		46	43	3
Some College	54	46	8		47	45	2
College Grad	52	46	6		47	47	0
Postgrad	44	55	-11		54	41	13
East	43	56	-13		40	50	-10
Midwest	51	48	3		43	47	-4
South	58	42	16		52	39	13
West	49	50	-1		43	50	-7

For all the talk about Obama's problem with women voters who supported Hillary Clinton, there's really no evidence for this. The gender gap (calculated as the women's Democratic vote minus the men's Democratic vote divided by two) in 2004 was 7 points and this year it's 6 points, essentially the same.

Among older voters (the other age categories didn't exactly match up across the two data sets) McCain is running much stronger than Bush. In 2004, Bush won this group by just 5 points, but McCain is winning by 12 points. This is no surprise since Obama's support in the primaries was always weakest among this group, due at least in part to his race.

On the other hand, Obama is running no worse among whites overall than Kerry did in 2004, suggesting that if he's losing any ground among older whites, he's making it up among younger whites. In addition, Obama is getting nearly unanimous support among blacks and running much better than Kerry among Latinos, another group that Obama is supposedly cool to Obama. In fact, Obama's 62-29 margin among Latino's is very similar to Gore's 62-35 margin in 2000.

This comparison also undermines the idea that Obama runs best among highly educated voters (his critics have ridiculed him as the candidate of the faculty lounge). The comparison shows that he's actually running a bit better than Kerry in all education categories, with the biggest improvements in the two middle categories, those with some college or those with a college degree.

A regional analysis shows that the 2008 candidates run about the same in the East and the South as Bush and Kerry did in 2004, though somewhat surprisingly, Obama is doing better in the South and McCain better in the East. The results from the South are likely the result of Obama maxing out among black voters. As for the East, I'm not sure, though this could be a function of McCain's support among older voters. In the Midwest, Obama runs better than Kerry did, but much of this is probably due to his running up big margins in his home state of Illinois. Finally, Obama is performing much better in the West than Kerry did. This is probably the result of his better numbers among Latinos, but also his surprising strength in usually Republican areas of the Mountain West like Colorado, Nevada, and Montana.

Let me close with a plea to the nice people at Gallup--please keep providing these demographic breakdowns on a regular basis.  They aren't that hard to do, plus they give election junkies like me lots to chew on.