Poll: Thesis negatives dragging down McDonnell

Has the controversy over Bob McDonnell’s 1989 graduate-school thesis had an impact on the Virginia governor’s race? A new poll suggests that it has, and that it has the potential to do more damage as more voters start to pay attention to the upcoming state elections.

Fifty-two percent of the 600 registered voters surveyed by Clarus Research Group for its poll released on Tuesday said they had heard about the McDonnell thesis. Of that subset, 5 percent said the story feel more favorable toward McDonnell’s candidacy, 31 percent said it made them feel less favorable, and 63 percent said it had no effect on their opinion of McDonnell. That’s a net negative of 26 percent for McDonnell from the story among the overall voter population, which is significant as the Clarus poll suggests that the race has tightened a small bit, from a seven-point lead as was measured in a recent Washington Post live-interviewer poll to a five-point lead in the similarly-done live-interviewer Clarus poll, with 42 percent of voters surveyed saying they plan to vote for McDonnell, 37 percent saying they plan to vote for Deeds and 20 percent undecided.

The thesis story seems to have had its biggest impact among the Democratic base, which pollsters have been assuming for months to be much less energized than the Republican voter base, fueling the reported 10-point-plus margins for McDonnell in the summertime polls. Among the subset of voters who told Clarus that they view McDonnell less favorably since the revelations of the contents of his grad-school thesis, 76 percent were Democrats, 8 percent were Republicans and 16 percent were independents.

The no-effect subset was 6 percent Republican, 29 percent Democrat and 34 percent independent.

What these poll numbers would seem to suggest is that Deeds has room to gain as more of the electorate becomes aware of the contents of the thesis, which laid out a blueprint for a radical social-conservative agenda that has raised questions about McDonnell’s attempt to characterize himself as a mainstream moderate Republican, both among Democratic voters and among some independents.

Clarus also had the down-ticket races much closer than we’ve seen from other polls – with Republican Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling leading Democratic opponent Jody Wagner by a 38 percent-to-32 percent margin, with 30 percent undecided, and Republican Ken Cuccinelli leading Democrat Steve Shannon in the attorney-general race by a 35 percent-to-30 percent margin, with 35 percent undecided.

The Clarus polling registered Democratic Sen. Mark Warner’s job-approval rating at 61 percent and President Barack Obama’s job-approval rating at 48 percent in Virginia.

– Story by Chris Graham