Maine Owl

New poll has the Question 1 contest a dead heat, 48-48


Jesse Connolly of Protect Maine Equality (the No on 1 campaign) appeared on the Rachel Maddow Show yesterday evening.

Gerald at Dirigo Blue has been all over the school canard fueling the anti-marriage-equality campaign, for example in the previous post (much more HERE). Jesse Connolly dissects that type of fear mongering from proponents of Question 1 in the interview with Rachel Maddow.

Meanwhile, a new release from Public Policy Polling says that in a survey of 1,130 likely voters from October 16th to 19th,

48% say they will vote to over turn the law while 48% say they will vote to keep it with only 4% of the electorate still undecided.

The survey's margin of error is +/-2.9%.

Yikes! This is a much closer result than a Pan Atlantic poll released last week showing a 51-42 lead for No on 1. Nate Silver has a rundown on these and two other Question 1 polls HERE. The polls are "somewhat contradictory." What matters, then, according to Nate Silver, is who actually turns out to vote.

Silver writes, " if you had a 2008-type turnout, the marriage ban would fail." But, "there's not going to be a 2008-type turnout."

So it all rests on who gets their supporters to the voting booth on November 3. Silver continues with a deep analysis of the PPP age demographics, which he characterizes as perhaps "on the pessimistic side." So No on 1 may still have a slight lead. But the contest can fairly be called a toss-up.

Update: Did I really have "opposition to" Question 1 doing the fear mongering? Oy. Confusion. I fixed that above.