Mason-Dixon poll: Obama holds slim lead over McCain

Media General News Service
Published: November 3, 2008

Barack Obama continues to hold a slim lead over John McCain in Virginia, according to Mason-Dixon Polling & Research, but many voters still aren’t telling the pollster which candidate they support.

A Mason-Dixon poll on Saturday showed Democrat Obama favored by 47 percent of Virginia voters and Republican McCain by 44 percent. Because of Mason-Dixon’s four-point margin of error, the numbers were not definitive.

But a perhaps more important component of the poll was the 9 percent of voters who said they were undecided - the most ever in a Mason-Dixon poll for a major election in Virginia.

Lynchburg-area political leaders didn’t take the poll results for granted.

The numbers “tell me this thing is still wide open” and “going down to the wire,“ said Wendell Walker, a leader among Lynchburg-area Republicans.

John Lawrence, chairman of the Lynchburg Democratic Party, said “I feel real good about Virginia; I think we are going to get it for sure” for Obama.

But, Lawrence said, “I really don’t trust polls.“

In the Lynchburg-Danville area, McCain enjoyed a 52-40 lead in Saturday’s poll. On Oct. 22, Mason-Dixon indicated McCain’s lead here had shrunk to 5 points, but the poll’s margin of error increases when results are broken down by region and include only 70 interviews with voters in the area.

Mason-Dixon based the results on 625 interviews done statewide Thursday and Friday with likely voters.

The percentage of undecideds has varied by only one or two points since September, when Mason-Dixon did the first of its four polls in Virginia this fall.

The “undecided” factor “is considerably higher than in previous presidential races in Virginia,“ said Bradford Coker, managing director of Mason-Dixon Polling & Research.

In 2004, only 5 percent were undecided in the final poll between George W. Bush and John Kerry, Coker said. In 2000, only 6 percent were undecided between Bush and Al Gore.

The largest sector of undecided voters in a major Virginia election was 8 percent in the 1989 Doug Wilder-Marshall Coleman race for governor, Coker said. Wilder was the first African-American to seriously contend for that office.

The Mason-Dixon poll has trended toward Obama over the campaign’s closing weeks, based on solid support for him in Northern Virginia and an emerging pattern in the Hampton Roads area.

Obama’s three-point lead is significant, Coker said.

“It will be interesting to see if he can close the deal with the larger-than-normal bloc of ‘undecided’ voters - of whom 93 percent are white and 75 percent do not live in Northern Virginia,“ Coker said.

Lawrence said he’d read that two-thirds of people who tell pollsters they’re undecided really have made up their minds and just won’t say so.

Reed is a staff writer for The News & Advance in Lynchburg.