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Poll: McCain has suburban-voter edge over Obama

BY KARLA SCHUSTER | karla.schuster@newsday.com

September 30, 2008

Republican presidential nominee John McCain has a slight edge over Democratic rival Barack Obama among suburban voters, drawing his strongest support from men and affluent married couples with children, according to a new poll released yesterday.

Overall, 48 percent of suburban voters said they supported McCain, compared with 42 percent for Obama, according to the poll conducted for Hofstra's National Center for Suburban Studies.

The spiraling economic decline ranked as their chief concern in the presidential election and their personal lives: 46 percent said it is the issue they most want to hear the candidates discuss, while 49 percent reported that they or someone they know has lost a job in the past year.

So even as the economic crisis cuts into McCain's poll numbers nationally, his slim support among suburban voters suggests "that he very much has a fighting chance" in November, said Lawrence Levy, director of the Suburban Studies center.

"Suburban voters are very reliable. They come out in large numbers," he said. "In the last four or five presidential cycles, the suburbs have been the most decisive voting bloc."

Levy said that while Obama's historic candidacy has drawn hundreds of thousands of young voters into the race, "the expanded voting pool ... is just not that reliable" because as first-time voters their turnout is harder to predict.

The poll also revealed that suburban voters defy easy analysis, and often follow different patterns from their urban and rural counterparts.

For instance, married suburban voters and suburban parents back McCain by large margins, but those same voters in cities and rural areas are more evenly divided, the poll found.

Perhaps most starkly, the suburban gender gap is opposite that found in urban and rural areas. Suburban men back McCain by a wide margin, but only give him a slim advantage everywhere else. At the same time, suburban women are split evenly between McCain and Obama, while their rural and urban counterparts overwhelmingly support Obama.

"It punctures the long-standing myth about suburban America, that it's all-white and middle class and married with children," said Christopher Niedt, academic director of the National Center for Suburban Studies. "... We see here that they are much more politically divided."

SUBURBAN VOTERS

48% 42%

McCain Obama

URBAN VOTERS

34% 57%

McCain Obama

RURAL VOTERS

51% 35%

McCain Obama

Highlights from the Hofstra poll:

51% of suburban men support McCain;

31% favor Obama.

45% of suburban women support McCain; 45% favor Obama.

46% of suburban voters say the economy is the most important issue in the election, compared to 42% of urban and rural voters.

9% of suburban voters say the Iraq war is the most important election issue, compared to 8% of urban and rural voters.

The telephone survey of 1,033 suburban residents and 493 urban and rural residents was conducted from Sept. 15-21. The total margin of error was plus or minus 3 percentage points; for suburban residents it was plus or minus 4 percentage points.