Poll-itics

The most recent Quinnipiac poll indicates that Romney is trailing Obama by 7 points in New Jersey.  In 2008, Obama won our state by 16 points.  No Republican presidential candidate has won the Garden State since Ronald Reagan.  It’s not time to celebrate, just yet.  The state has gone from “liking Obama” to “leaning towards Obama,” which is encouraging news, but we still have work to do in these last 18 days, the time when Undecideds are most likely to finally pay attention, like non-baseball fans who only watch the World Series and have no idea what’s going on.

The details of the poll are very interesting:  Romney has a 4-point lead over men, whites, Protestants, Catholics and Born-Again Christians.  New Jersey voters polled also have more faith in Romney’s ability to turn the economy around than Obama’s.  More than half of likely Garden State voters say the government is controlling things better left to businesses and individuals, the poll found. By contrast, 43 percent believe the government should be doing more.

The poll was taken on Sept. 6, long before the debates.  Maurice Carroll, director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute, states that 90 percent of voters on each side say “they stand by their man” and that “[T]he votes look to be locked in.

That leaves the 10 percent undecided on each side.  What will the deciding vote come down to?  The economy and jobs?  Foreign policy?  Immigration?  Or will it be welfare, union jobs, and regionalization – imposing the transformation Obama promised?  Forcing workers back to the cities if they want to work, using mass transportation, living in crowded, clustered housing, incompatible with middle class values, but amenable to the poor, who’ll either be given the housing outright or paying low rental fees, which the property owners, or the government through the taxpayers, will have to absorb. Granting amnesty to illegal immigrants already living here.

Will young independents be lured by the prospect of “free” contraception provided by Obamacare and be swayed by the false argument that Conservatives want to tell them how to live their private lives?  Last night in a tea party panel discussion on Obamacare, a doctor who runs a free clinic told the story of how one of his assistants boasted about getting free contraceptives.  He asked her if her co-pay had gone up; it had.  “Then it wasn’t free,” he told her.  “You’re paying for it.”

There a couple of reasons why Romney is closing the gap in New Jersey.   People may be waking up, and especially in the wake of three disastrous debates for Obama (yes, including the last one), are beginning to see the real Obama.  Or, the Media is manipulating the polls to suppress the Conservative vote and scare their own base into voting.  The GOP has finally put up a viable candidate that Independents can latch onto, someone with good business creds. 

Finally, the Tea Parties have been more effective than either party would like to admit.  No one has to tell New Jerseyans that the economy is really bad.  But someone has to tell them that it’s the government, not business, that has created the disaster, and that it has been decades in the making.  The Tea Parties are up to the task, along with groups like Americans for Prosperity hich has been putting out just amazing, fact-filled commercials over the radio airwaves.

Ultimately, it’s the family dinner table and backyard fence conversations that have been convincing people.  At last night’s meeting, the moderator polled the large crowd on how they’d heard about the meeting.  Friends and family was the overwhelming answer.

In this age of message machines, one wonders how the polling organizations even get their information.  Tomorrow, we New Jersey Tea Partiers have the choice of phone-banking in Pompton Lakes and Westwood Park (West Paterson) or handing out literature either door to door, or by walking through the business district.  They’re calling tomorrow “Super Saturday.”

In years past, none of us would have even given campaigning a thought.  The stakes are that high, however, that many of us are willing to give up part of our Saturday afternoon to campaign for the salvation of our country.