Thursday, January 19, 2006

Two New Polls Out

First of all, Survey USA has Mitt Romney's January approval rating, numbers that are not totally meaningless now that the Governor has declined to run for reelection, but interesting nonetheless. Romney's numbers have declined slightly since that announcement; he's now at 47% approve, 48% disapprove. These numbers have hovered around 50% since I've been paying attention to them, and you can see the trend lines here.

But Mitt Romney's not going to be on the ballot in November, so those numbers are only important in so far as they rub off on Romney's handpicked successor, Lieutenant Governor Kerry Healey. Luckily, we have the Wall Street Journal/Zogby Interactive polls to fill in those gaps. Here are those results:

Tom Reilly:49.8%
Kerry Healey:32.4%

Deval Patrick:51.3%
Kerry Healey:29.4%

These numbers are a bit more realistic than the numbers Zogby put out in October, but it should be noted that the methodology for these polls is very fishy. I would not be surprised if both Democrats were beating the Lieutenant Governor, but honestly, I'm skeptical of any poll that has Deval Patrick doing better than Tom Reilly against Kerry Healey, even with the Attorney General's recent bad press. This month's Statehouse News Poll should come out in the next week or two and I think that will give us a better picture of the governor's race.

Thanks to the fine folks over at Daily Kos for pointing out these polls.