Dante Scala's Blog

This just in from the Department of Shameless Plugs: I'm hosting a Debate Watch at the University of New Hampshire next Wednesday night.

Joining me will be an excellent panel of analysts: Republican Rich Killion, Democrat Steve Marchand, and UNH professors Jennifer Borda and Andy Smith, director of the UNH Survey Center and my colleague in the department of political science.

In the past 24 hours, we've seen not one, but two polls showing Barack Obama up double digits in New Hampshire. 

Are we seeing not one, but two outliers? Has New Hampshire turned a Vermont shade of blue? I don't think so, and here's why.

Let's start with a look at the national polls. It's clear that Obama has broken this race wide open, at least for now.  Pollster.com estimates his lead nationally at 7 points. 

So if Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Jeanne Shaheen and presidential nominee Barack Obama have equal support among Democrats and women, why is Shaheen polling a couple points better than the man at the top of the ticket?

Here are some subgroups in which Shaheen leads Obama by five percentage points or more, according to September's Granite State Poll from the University of New Hampshire:

Former Gov. Jeanne Shaheen still "leads" Barack Obama by a couple points in New Hampshire.  After the most recent string of polls, Shaheen stands at 48.1 percent, two points ahead of Obama's 46.2 percent, according to Pollster.com.  

But the two Democrats at the top of the ticket are now running in tandem when it comes to two obviously important groups: women and Democrats.

For the truly obsessive-compulsive poll watchers among us (and yes, we're certainly talking to you), Pollster.com has devised a fully interactive Flash chart of all New Hampshire surveys of the presidential race. 

Among other nifty features, the website now allows you to filter out individual pollsters, and then redraws the graphs without those particular data points.

Tune into WMUR for the news at 5, 6, or 11, and the dominant political ads aren't for John McCain and Barack Obama. It's Jeanne Shaheen, John Sununu, and their assorted allies, whacking each other with two-by-fours all evening long.

So far, though, the ad battles have been the political equivalent of trench warfare: Lots of fire back and forth, but very little territory changing hands.

As promised, a follow-up to last week’s post on the state primary:

As Fergus Cullen rightly noted, the three towns of Rockingham County that sit in NH 02 (Atkinson, Salem, and Windham) represent a large number of votes.  Indeed, these three towns cast more votes in the September primary than Coos County or Sullivan County. 

What's more, those three towns are heavily Republican.  Combined, they cast 3,450 GOP ballots and 1,755 Democratic ballots in the state primary. 

It's the same, but different

In the last post, we showed how very little has changed in the Sununu-Shaheen rematch (although we still have six and a half weeks for something to change).

Is anything different between now and then? Yes.

Inspired by my colleague Wally Edge, I traveled back to the October 2002 University of New Hampshire Survey Center poll he mentioned today, and pulled out a crosstab.

Then I pulled the same crosstab from the most recent UNH poll this past July:

Here's the "before" and "after":

Last week's state primary turnout offers a glimpse of how different New Hampshire's two congressional districts have become.

Almost 72,000 voters participated in the Republican primary, which featured two competitive congressional primaries.  About 50,000 took the Democratic ballot, which featured no contests at the congressional or gubernatorial levels.   That's a turnout ratio of 1.43 Republicans for every Democrat.