First things first; if you haven’t read Shoebox’s post, go read it now, then come back for some expansion on that.
I briefly noted the disappearance of the PUMAs in a different poll (specifically, the Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll) near the end of last month. Since we’re talking about the Gallup weekly aggregate of the daily tracking poll, I’ll use Gallup’s numbers to expand on that.
Gallup has been running the weekly aggregate since the week of June 9-15. That week, Barack Obama’s support was 78% of Democrats/43% of Independents/9% of Republicans, while John McCain’s support was 13%D/39%I/84%R. In terms of Democrats, 22% didn’t support Obama, with 13% specifically supporting McCain and the other 9% either supporting a third-party candidate or “undecided” (which includes not voting).
That held rather steady until the Democratic convention. Pre-convention Democratic support of Obama topped out at 82% the week of 7/7-7/13, and returned to 78% the week prior to the convention (8/18-8/24) when he announced Joe Biden as his running mate. Meanwhile, the Democratic support for McCain never dropped below 10% in that time frame (with the low point 7/7-7/13) and topped out at 14% just before the Democratic convention, while the “undecideds” remained between 8% and 9% (the lower just before the Democratic convention). That tracks rather well with Shoebox’s estimates that, had the PUMAs stuck to their guns instead of party, McCain could have had somewhere around 15% of support from Democrats, though I would have been happy with the 12% average that he did get between June and mid-August.
The Democratic convention week (8/25-8/31), which was immediately followed by McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin, provided a boost to the Obama/Biden ticket for Democrats, but not a decisive one. The Obama/Biden ticket saw support from 85% of Democrats that week, with a 9% support to McCain and 6% undecided. Democratic support for the Obama/Biden ticket actually dipped in the next couple weeks: the 9/1-9/7 aggregate saw it drop to 83%, with 11% supporting McCain/Palin, and the 9/8-9/14 aggregate saw McCain/Palin pick up another percent from the “undecideds” to bring that back to the average between June and mid-August.
However, there has been a steady march back to the roost for the PUMAs since then. The Obama/Biden-to-McCain/Palin splits among Democrats have been, in succession, 85%/10%, 86%/10%, 87%/8%, 87%/9% and now 89%/7%.
Shoebox’s reminder back in August that there wasn’t much of a difference between Obama and Hillary Clinton, and specifically his concerns that the PUMAs would remember that before the election, are coming true.
