Amid all the polls coming out this week, let me highlight two interesting results.
1. The NBC/Wall Street Journal national Republican poll showing Ted Cruz leading Donald Trump 28 to 26 percent, with 17 percent for Marco Rubio, 11 percent for John Kasich, 10 percent for Ben Carson and only 4 percent for Jeb Bush.
This poll is an outlier, the only public poll showing Trump trailing while others show him with a double-digit lead. Bill McInturff, the Republican half of the NBC/WSJ polling team, is careful to hold out the possibility that, as he puts it, “the numbers snap back into place.” He notes that the percentage of “very conservative” voters was significantly higher than in the January NBC/WSJ poll; Cruz did very well with very conservative voters (44 percent in Iowa and 23 percent in New Hampshire) and not at all well with somewhat conservative voters (9 percent in both Iowa and New Hampshire).
The most interesting result here in my view is that in one-on-one pairings, Rubio and Cruz come out well ahead of Trump, while Bush and Kasich come out behind. The ceiling for Trump support seems to have been lowered, at least in this poll, and the candidates more acceptable to very conservative voters are able to take advantage of that.
2. The Democratic firm Public Policy Polling has polls of Democratic primary voters in 12 states with upcoming primaries. Hillary Clinton leads in 10 of the states, with Bernie Sanders leading in Massachusetts 49 to 42 percent and in his home state of Vermont 86 to 10 percent. As PPP notes, Clinton gets the votes of 67 to 74 percent of black voters in the nine states among them with significant black populations (that excludes Vermont, Massachusetts and Oklahoma).
I think these results show Clinton weakness in two ways. Among black voters, she’s not replicating the near-unanimous percentages that Barack Obama won against her in 2008. That parallels what we have seen in the most recent South Carolina polls and what (little) we know about black voters in Nevada, where Democrats caucus Saturday and where the latest poll showed the race even. In Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Mississippi blacks form about half of the Democratic primary electorate; in Arkansas, Michigan, Tennessee and Texas they form about one-quarter. The states voting in the first half of March tend to have higher black percentages than those voting later.
Among white voters, Clinton is obviously flailing, running barely even among them in states as diverse as Massachusetts and Oklahoma. She’s losing “beer Democrats” to Sanders and ran more weakly among them in New Hampshire in a two-candidate race this year than she did in a three-candidate race eight years ago. She did run better, however, among “wine Democrats” with incomes over $200,000; the largest of the very few towns she carried in New Hampshire were the high-income suburbs of Bedford and Windham. There are quite a few such rich Democrats in New York and California, which could help her there. But what does it say for the general election if she wins the Democratic nomination carrying only blacks and the very wealthiest whites?
One more thing. The states PPP tested have relatively low Hispanic populations. In 2008 Clinton owed her margins in Texas and California to the large majorities she won among Hispanic voters, carrying 70 percent of more in counties in Texas’s Lower Rio Grande Valley, for example. Can she duplicate those percentages this year? The fragmentary evidence from Nevada polls suggests not; the results of Saturday night’s caucuses there will tell us more.
