Wednesday, October 1, 2008

obama labor organizer says it ain't over yet

from Talking Points Memo:
In an unusually candid interview, a top official for the largest union backing Obama said that internal union polling shows that the race remains much more volatile and fluid in key battleground states than public polling suggests. He warned that low-information swing-state voters are saying they still don't have a firm enough grasp on Obama's life-story, character and record for the Illinois Senator to close the deal with them.

The comments by the official, AFL-CIO deputy political director Mike Podhorzer, are surprisingly frank and seemed intended as a reality check at a time when polls show the momentum has clearly swung in Obama's favor.

"This election remains extremely volatile in the battlegrounds," Podhorzer told us. "The public polls are giving a false sense of precision about where the race is. That's a story that's not really being told."

Strikingly, Podhorzer said that his union's internal polls -- which push voters hard on the question of whether people are really firmly committed to their pick -- show that as many as "15 to 20 percent" of battleground state voters remain "persuadable," as he put it, despite what public polls say about the level of undecided voters.

"There are more voters than you'd expect who are just starting to pay attention to the election," he said. "And there's a lot of room for people to go back and forth"...

No comments: