Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney holds a slight edge over U.S. President Barack Obama in New Hampshire, according to the fifth annual New Hampshire State of the State Poll released by the Rockefeller Center on Wednesday.
Of the 403 respondents to the poll, 43.9 percent said they would vote for Romney in a head-to-head matchup between the two candidates, while 42.4 percent indicated that they would vote for Obama and 13.7 percent were undecided. The results of the poll have a margin of error of 4.9 percent, according to a Rockefeller Center press release.
"The presidential race is a tight one, and we remain a battleground state," Ronald Shaiko, Rockefeller Center associate director and the survey's director, said.
Romney's lead over Obama has decreased since 2011, when poll results indicated a 47 percent to 39 percent edge for Romney.
Obama's approval rating in New Hampshire increased approximately 3 percent since the 2011 poll, from 36.4 percent to 39.2 percent. His disapproval rating also increased during the same period, moving from 46.8 percent to 48.1 percent.
The proportion of respondents expressing support for same-sex marriage increased by roughly 14 percent since last year, rising from 41.5 percent to 55.1 percent. In what was an ongoing saga in New Hampshire politics, the New Hampshire House of Representatives voted down a bill on March 21 that would have repealed the state's same-sex marriage law, a result that surprised many legislators given the Republican domination of the House.
The number of survey respondents who identified with each political party "matched closely" with that of the New Hampshire population, Shaiko said.
Roughly 33.7 percent of survey respondents identified themselves as Republicans, while 27.2 percent identified as Democrats and 38.1 percent said they were undeclared. Approximately 30 percent of New Hampshire's registered voters are Republicans, 29 percent are Democrats and 41 percent are undeclared, according a report released by ABC News in January.
"It's interesting because New Hampshire has so many moderate and undeclared voters," public policy professor Benjamin Cole said. "The campaign is going to have surprising and meaningful competition."
The poll also indicated that voters are more optimistic about the national economy since last year, with the percentage of respondents who rated the economy excellent, good or fair increasing from 38.6 percent to 53.9 percent.
Respondents who thought favorably of the economy tended to support Obama, while those who regarded the economy as poor generally expressed support for Romney.
"The economy really is a driver to voter preferences in the presidential contest," Shaiko said.
At the state level, the poll indicated a 65.4 percent approval rating for Gov. John Lynch, D-N.H., which marks a 6 percent increase from last year.
The approval rating of the New Hampshire legislature dropped by roughly two points since 2011, however, from 24 percent to 21.9 percent.
"When we tested out some issues that have been before the state legislature, we found significant opposition to some of the issues they've taken up this year," Shaiko said.
The poll also showed that respondents demonstrated limited name recognition for the 2012 New Hampshire gubernatorial candidates. While Republican Ovide Lamontagne had the most support with 12 percent of respondents' votes, 78 percent of poll participants said they were unsure for whom to vote in the election.
Among social policy issues, most respondents said they opposed guns on college campuses, opposed the refusal of contraceptive coverage in insurance plans and supported a ban on cell phones while driving.
Approximately 40 percent of participants favored voting eligibility for college students in New Hampshire, while 38 percent were in opposition and 22 percent expressed uncertainty.
Demographics of poll participants revealed that approximately 52 percent of respondents were male and 48 percent were female. Respondents were also evenly split geographically, with about 50 percent in both the first and second Congressional districts.
Over 60 percent of poll participants graduated from college, indicating that the sample was more highly educated than the general New Hampshire population. Respondents represented a variety of age groups, with 29 percent falling between the ages of 18 and 49, 33 percent between 50 and 64 and 28 percent 65 or older.
Cole, who served as the faculty supervisor during the polling process, said finding a representative sample of the voter population in terms of age was a "challenge."
The registered voter list used in the poll did not include voter cell phone numbers, limiting respondents to a mostly "systemically older population that uses landlines," Cole said. "Our data tends to be skewed demographically."
Students who participated in the polling conducted telephone surveys April 2-5, contacting individuals on a registered voter list, according to the Rockefeller Center press release.
Students enrolled in Cole's Statistical Analysis for Public Policy course and government professor Deborah Brooks's Polling the Public in Politics and Business course were required to participate in the process, Cole and Brooks said.
Following the polling's completion, Michael Altamirano '13 and Christopher Whitehead '12 entered the data into an Excel spreadsheet and used STATA, a statistical software package, to analyze the results.
"The work boiled down to spending enough time using STATA to provide evidence for or against certain political expectations people might have, as well as comparing this year's results from previous years to show how opinion is trending," Altamirano said in an email to The Dartmouth.
Altamirano and Whitehead then wrote the report detailing the results of the poll under the direction of Shaiko, according to Whitehead.
The most interesting portions of the poll included the relatively high increase in support for same-sex marriage and "uncertainty" regarding the upcoming New Hampshire gubernatorial elections, Whitehead said.
"It was a pretty cool thing that Rocky does," Whitehead said. "It was fun to be on the front line of determining what voter attitudes are."
