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Zogby has McCain/Palin pulling ahead and men, not women, favoring Palin; and I offer a poll about that.

It's 49.7% to 45.9% for September 5-6. It was 47.1% (McCain/Palin) to 44.6% (Obama/Biden) for August 29-30.

I'm surprised how few voters are undecided (or for someone other the major party candidates): only 4.4%. But maybe people are shiftable, and claiming to be undecided just isn't as cool as it used to be. Maybe I should stop doing it! Ha ha. But I am undecided. I insist that the candidates woo me until the bitter end.

Now, an interesting thing is that the August 29-30 poll showed 8.3% undecided, which means that the conventions (or whatever else may have happened in the last few days) pushed 3.9% to take a position. If we were to assume that the change in the numbers represented only people moving out of the "others/not sure" category, then 2.6% went to McCain/Palin, and 1.3% went to Obama/Biden.

Another interesting thing is that the polls come out different if you ask the question using only the names of the presidential candidates, with McCain at 48.8% and Obama at 45.7% (and "others/not sure" at 5.5%). So it seems that Palin helps McCain much more than Biden helps Obama.

Zogby analyzes:

Clearly, Palin is helping the McCain ticket. She has high favorability numbers, and has unified the Republican Party. The striking thing here in this poll is that McCain has pulled ahead among Catholics by double-digits. On the other hand, Palin is not helping with likely voting women who are not aligned with either political party. The undecided independent women voters decreased this week from 15% to 7%, but those women went to Obama. Palin is also helping among men, conservatives, notably with suburban and rural voters, and with frequent Wal-Mart shoppers, who tend to be "values" voters who like a good value for their money.

Fascinating. It's the men who are going for Palin and women aren't buying it? Can we still accuse men of sexism -- if they're fine with women candidates, even excited about them, so long as they support traditional family values? Meanwhile, the women voters stay put and are not swayed by the mere sex of the candidate. I'm trying to speculate about which sex does better at analyzing the candidates without taking gender into account. You could say it's the women, because Palin didn't move them, but they may be taking Palin's sex into account and rejecting her because she isn't hewing to the usual women's rights issues or because they are discriminating against her because of sex. And you could say the men are being gender-neutral and what they like about Palin is not her sex but her good, old-fashioned conservatism.

Assuming it's true that it's men, not women, who are enthusiastically embracing Sarah Palin, why is it?
	Men love her womanly charms, and women are discriminating against her because of her sex.
	Men love her womanly charms, and women soberly judge her to be too conservative.
	Women are discriminating against her, and men soberly approve of her impressive conservatism.
	Both men and women are thinking rationally, but men are more conservative.
pollcode.com free polls

Full post as published by Althouse on September 07, 2008 (boomark / email).