While a Smaller Business Association of New England poll of New England business owners in September showed Democratic Sen. Barack Obama leading as their presidential pick, this month’s SBANE poll showed Republican Sen. John McCain as the favorite.
Forty-five percent of approximately 60 SBANE members surveyed favored Obama last month, according to questionnaire data provided to Providence Business News. But in a similar poll of 70 business owners taken the day after the second presidential debate, held Oct. 7, those backing Obama dropped to 34 percent.
McCain’s supporters jumped from 33 percent in September to 54 percent in October.
But what’s surprising is that few of those business owners polled – only 7 percent – said that McCain had won the debate the night before. Thirty-six percent said that Obama had won.
On the other hand, 38 percent of respondents said that Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin had won the vice presidential debate. But in September, 39 percent of business owners had said that choosing Palin wasn’t a solid political move.
Only 24 percent of SBANE members said Sen. Joe Biden had won.
While SBANE’s poll offers a small, regional sample of business support trending toward McCain, a Brown University poll with a larger sample shows that Ocean State voters are favoring Obama.
This election season, the Brown University Taubman Center for Public Policy has twice polled about 500 registered voters. In August, Obama led by 20 percentage points, with 50 percent saying they’d vote for him. But another poll last month showed Obama’s Rhode Island lead shrinking to 13 percentage points.
Brown professor Marion Orr, the Taubman Center’s director, said that the gap tightened after McCain accepted the nomination from the Republican Party. “Typically, you find some tightening [after the acceptance speech], and you can see this playing out in the national polls,” Orr said. “And this race, between McCain and Obama, has seen its ups and downs in terms of the numbers.”
In Rhode Island, where the majority traditionally votes Democratic, Obama’s lead was well ahead of the average of major national polls, Orr said. In national polls, Obama last week was about 7.4 percentage points ahead of McCain, according to Real Clear Politics, a Chicago-based Web site that averages national polling data into one figure.
SBANE also asks those it polled about the economy.
While 53 percent of business owners said that the economy was shrinking – either rapidly or slowly – in September, 45 percent said their businesses were “stable.” Only 8 percent reported that they were “decreasing slowly.”
Asked earlier this month who was most responsible for the financial collapse, 44 percent blamed greed on Wall Street; another 35 percent blamed Congress.
But nearly half of SBANE members surveyed, 46 percent, were confident that the approved Emergency Economic Stabilization Act’s $700 billion bailout for the country’s financial system will “ease financial pressure.” The rest were split evenly between “No” and “Unsure” on the question.
Statewide, economic concerns are weighing heavily on voters, Orr said.
In September, 69.9 percent of responders said Rhode Island has “gotten off on the wrong track.” In August, it was 78 percent, according to the Taubman Center poll. •
