Presidential poll: Democrats leading in VA

SurveyUSA released a poll yesterday which shows the frontrunner Democratic candidates for president – Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards – leading the frontrunner Republican candidates – Rudy Giulani, Fred Thompson and Mitt Romney.

As you can see, Hillary Clinton does the best against all three candidates, leading Giuliani by 6 points, Thompson by 7 and poor Romney by 15! Even more impressive is that Clinton is at 50% or better against each of the Republicans, a margin only matched by Obama and Edwards when paired against Romney. Romney performed poorly in almost every category in this poll. He should feel fortunate that Virginia is not an early primary state.

As always, a look at the crosstabs brings out some interesting information. Nonwhite respondents overwhelmingly preferred the Democratic candidates and Clinton did better with this group of voters than the other three. Female voters also preferred the Democrats.

While one would expect that Democratic voters would prefer the Democratic candidates, interesting is the strength of that preference amongst those voters. Clinton gets between 83% and 88% of the Democratic vote, while Obama gets 71% to 75% and Edwards 78% to 82%. How much of this is name recognition? I have no idea. But it does say that Clinton is polling better amongst self-identified Ds than the other two.

John Edwards pushes more Republicans to either vote for him or be undecided than does Clinton or Obama. Republican support of the Republican candidate is 77% when Edwards is matched against Giuliani, 72% against Thompson, and 64% against Romney. However, Clinton’s overall support amongst nearly every demographic makes her appear to be the stronger candidate at this point.

One area that Clinton – and all of the Democrats – need to be concerned about is those voters in the 35-54 age group. Except against Romney, none of the candidates polled 50% or above with this age group. If the 42% polled is in line with the percentage of voters in Virginia, there is some work to be done here.