First Dartmouth-Associated Press poll on 2000 New Hampshire presidential primary released

Posted 11/10/99

The first of five Dartmouth College - Associated Press New Hampshire Primary Polls -- which was conducted Oct. 31-Nov. 3 by the Nelson A. Rockefeller Center at Dartmouth and released Nov. 10 -- produced the results presented in the tables below.

Dartmouth and the Associated Press plan to conduct four more polls before the New Hampshire Presidential Primary scheduled for Feb. 1. Prospective release dates for the remaining polls are Jan. 14, Jan. 21, Jan. 28 and Feb. 8 (the last of which will be a post-primary survey).

The first poll produced the following findings:

• Texas Governor Bush leads Arizona Senator John McCain by 44 percent to 31 percent, and Vice President Gore leads former New Jersey Senator Bill Bradley by 48 percent to 41 percent.
• In the Republican primary, publisher Steve Forbes continues to lag with 11 percent of the likely vote, and former ambassador Alan Keyes, former Reagan Administration official Gary Bauer, and Utah Senator Orrin Hatch remain clustered together with 3 percent or less.
• Among the top candidates in each party, women tend to favor George Bush more than John McCain and to prefer Al Gore to Bill Bradley.
• When asked whom they would vote for in the general election, a majority said they would vote for Bush over either Gore or Bradley. More voters picked McCain over Gore but they were split evenly when the match-up was between McCain and Bradley. These voters are not necessarily representative of the electorate that votes in November, however, because those who participate in primaries tend to be more partisan.
• Undeclared voters, who have registered to vote but are not affiliated with a party, do not affect the relative standings of the candidates.
• Despite the early stage of the campaign, voters appear to have fairly strong preferences for their preferred candidates; and most are able to rate the candidates favorably or unfavorably. Particularly striking is the fact that the top two Republicans, Bush and McCain, and the two Democrats, Bradley and Gore, enjoy very high ratios of favorable to unfavorable ratings. For Bush, the difference between those likely Republican voters who are favorable to his candidacy and those who are unfavorable is +65 percent; for McCain, the difference among likely Republican voters is +49 percent. Comparable differences among likely Democratic voters are +60 for Gore and +52 for Bradley.
• Among likely Democratic voters, opinions about President Bill Clinton seemed to affect voters' feelings towards the candidates: among the majority who felt positively toward Clinton, 58 percent expressed a preference for Gore, while among the minority of voters who felt negatively towards Clinton, 51 percent favored Bradley.
• Questions about the leading candidates' traits indicate that most voters have opinions about the capacity of the candidates for strong leadership as well as their trustworthiness. About a third of likely Republican voters thought that the phrase, "he provides strong leadership," or "he is trustworthy," fit both Bush and McCain "extremely well." Similar results about leadership traits and trustworthiness emerged from the responses of likely Democratic voters.
• Questions about the policy priorities of New Hampshire voters indicate that in both parties, health care is the most important issue, followed by education.

The poll included 448 likely voters for the Republican primary and 367 likely voters for the Democratic primary, who were identified through questions about voter registration, intention to vote and party identification. The margin of error due to sampling for the likely Republican primary sub-sample is plus or minus 4.6%, and the margin of error for the likely Democratic primary sub-sample is plus or minus 5.0%. The margin of error for the entire sample is 3.2%. Disparities in the totals listed in the various tables following are the result of missing data. The list of questions used for the poll described below is available on request.