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By Kenric Ward | Watchdog.org Virginia Bureau
FREDERICKSBURG — Republican Mitt Romney has pulled into a tie with President Barack Obama in Virginia, despite the challenger’s rising “negatives.”
Mitt Romney pulls into a tie in Virginia, despite rising negatives.
Romney and Obama are deadlocked at 44 percent, says a Quinnipiac poll released Thursday. Quinnipiac’s survey in March showed the president with an eight-point lead in the key swing state.
But internal indicators in the poll suggest Romney’s momentum may be limited. His unfavorable rating increased from 29 percent in October 2011 to 42 percent in the latest survey.
Obama’s unfavorable rating dropped a point from 49 percent to 48 percent during the same period. But that’s not necessarily good news for a president who is upside-down, with a favorable rating of just 46 percent.
Kyle Kondik, political analyst at the University of Virginia Center for Politics, told Watchdog.org Virginia Bureau that Romney’s favorability fell as a natural result of the GOP campaign.
“The election remains a referendum on the incumbent, and the economy isn’t good and Obama’s favorability is weak,” he said.
The Quinnipiac Poll also found that Virginia’s U.S. Senate race is a dead heat, with the Republican, former Sen. George Allen, at 46 percent and former Democratic Gov. Tim Kaine at 44 percent.
Polls have flip-flopped one or two percentage points either way, with a high share of voters saying they don’t know enough about the candidates to decide.
Some 27 percent said they didn’t know enough about Allen, who served one term in the U.S. Senate from 2000-06. Twenty-one percent said they didn’t know enough about Kaine, governor from 2005 to 2009.
“The Senate race remains a dog fight and every indication is it will remain that way until Nov. 6,” said Quinnipiac pollster Peter Brown.
“Interestingly the vast majority of voters say their votes in the Senate race will be about the candidates themselves and have no relation to their feelings about the president.”
