Relying on some somewhat old numbers (the poll was in the field during the second week in June), Gallup offers a good news/bad news assessment for Democrats and fans of the president regarding the impact that third-party candidates may have on the upcoming battle for the White House.
The good news for Democrats: Any success for third-party candidates is liable to come from Mitt Romney, and will pad the president's advantage.
The bad news for Democrats: Whatever numbers those third-party candidates swing in polling data is almost certainly not going to be replicated in November at the ballot box.
So ... there's that. Onto the numbers:
PRESIDENTIAL GENERAL ELECTION TRIAL HEATS:
NATIONAL (Gallup Tracking): Obama d. Romney (48-44)
NATIONAL w/THIRD PARTY CANDIDATES (Gallup): Barack Obama (D) 47, Mitt Romney (R) 40, Gary Johnson (L) 3, Ron Paul (?) 2, Jill Stein (G) 1, Virgil Goode (C) <1
NATIONAL (Rasmussen Tracking): Romney d. Obama (46-44)
CALIFORNIA (Field Poll): Obama d. Romney (55-37)
DOWNBALLOT POLLING:
TX-SEN—R (WPA Opinion Research for Cruz): Ted Cruz 49, David Dewhurst 40
A few thoughts, as always, await you just past the jump ...
That the existence of third-party candidates works to the benefit of Barack Obama should come as little surprise. If you make two assumptions (that voters are still equivocal on the president, but they are also less than fond of Mitt Romney), it would then follow logically that the adding of candidates to the field would splinter (however incrementally) the anti-Obama votes.
However, it should also come as little surprise that none of the current candidates garner much support. The 2 percent support for Ron Paul is notable if only because he was not listed by Gallup, that was entirely from respondents that volunteered his name. Of the three listed candidates, they garnered less than 4.5 percent of the vote. And, ultimately, why would they? Johnson is the best known candidate, but he was governor of New Mexico a decade ago, and was not really a household name outside of the Land of Enchantment even then. The other two candidates are a perennial Green Party candidate and a former Democrat-turned-Republican congressman from central Virginia. Not exactly a trio of household names in the bunch.
What's more: Gallup went back in time and found that when they had previously polled third-party candidates, their final vote totals wound up being a fraction of what they had polled in the summer. Indeed, only Ralph Nader (3 percent) was even half of what he polled in the summer (6 percent). The rest weren't even close to where they polled.
In their analysis, Gallup actually does a decent job of explaining why this phenomenon exists:
The drop in support during the campaign is likely due to two factors. First, historically, third-party candidates' support typically drops as the campaign approaches Election Day, perhaps because voters realize the candidates have little chance to win. Second, generally speaking, support for third-party candidates tends to be higher in the broader pool of registered voters than in the smaller group of actual voters.
Thus, in the final analysis, while it might be plausible to see third-party candidates log more than the 1.53 percent they received in 2008, it is highly unlikely that they'll snag much more than that. As is almost always the case in presidential elections, this one will likely come down to the Republican and the Democrat, heads up.
In other polling news ...
- The poll to look for next week, if it actually exists, is a counter-argument from the team for longtime GOP frontrunner David Dewhurst in Texas, where the GOP Senate runoff is on tap in just over three weeks. Today, Ted Cruz's campaign dropped a bomb by declaring that their new poll showed Cruz up by a fairly solid margin (nine points) over Dewhurst. Dewhurst, you will recall, led in the first round of the GOP primary by high single digits. The Cruz poll is, indeed, plausible: One school of thought (supported by PPP's Tom Jensen right after the first round of the primary) says that while Cruz has fewer supporters, his more dogged advocates are more likely to show up for a low-turnout runoff in the heat of July.
- We now have a full-week of post-Supreme Court sampling by the Gallup crew, and they have found a very consistent result: Obama +4, as he was for the last three days. What will be interesting to see is what next week's numbers wind up showing. A lot of pollsters, understandably, stayed on the sidelines during this holiday week. I suspect that polling will ramp up a little this coming week, and they might provide a decent baseline of where the race stands, at present.
- One place where we have a baseline, and it has barely budged, is California. The Field Poll, respected locally as the Gold Standard of Golden State polling, gives the president an 18-point edge, propelled by laudable personal popularity and really lousy poll numbers for the challenger. What will be an interesting read, potentially: if Field polled the Senate race. Pre-primary numbers gave veteran Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein pretty middling polling numbers, and she failed to get over 50 percent of the vote in the all-party primary on June 6th. Elizabeth Emken, the GOP nominee, seems unlikely to make this a legitimate race, but Feinstein could, in theory, be underwhelming. Watch in the coming days to see if Field checked this race out, as they did the key propositions and the presidential affair.