July, August, November: New Poll Results Portray Shifting Election Currents

It’s July again in Wisconsin. What does that say about November?

Most likely, it says that the two big political contests in Wisconsin, with 10 electoral votes for president and a US Senate seek at stake, are not done-deals and that there will be continuing volatility among voters and intense campaigning by candidates for the next 10 weeks.

You can think of this as July in terms of the results of the Marquette Law School Poll. A new round of results, released on Wednesday, showed that both the presidential and Senate races had tightened since the most recent round of polling three weeks earlier. And the bump that Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton received in the early-August poll, conducted shortly after the national political conventions and amid a series of troubled developments for the Republican candidate Donald Trump, is gone. “The electorate in Wisconsin has returned to about where the vote stood in July, prior to the conventions,” said Charles Franklin, director of the poll and professor of law and public policy at Marquette Law School.

After a series of troubled developments for Clinton in recent weeks, her numbers were less favorable on a range of questions and she and Trump were back in a close race. The poll found Clinton ahead in Wisconsin by five percentage points among registered voters and three percentage points among likely voters.

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New Poll Shows Wider Clinton Lead, But It’s Not Over, Franklin Says

A member of the audience had a question Wednesday after Charles Franklin, director of the Marquette Law School Poll, and Mike Gousha, the Law School’s distinguished fellow in law and public policy, completed presenting the results of a new round of poll results.

“Isn’t it a fair statement that, between us guys, the presidential race is about over?” he asked.

Franklin responded, “I’m not there.” He added, “When we look at all of the presidential races since the ‘90s, where we have pretty good data, we actually see most of those showing some real rises and falls over time. . . .  I think it’s a bit of hubris to think that whatever we believe today is unchangeable, that no event can matter.”

That important point made, the new results, based on polling from August 4 to 7, showed movement since the last Law School Poll a month ago that left Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton with a wider lead than before over Republican candidate Donald Trump. In broad terms, Clinton’s numbers improved in the period that included the Democratic national convention and Trump’s numbers changed little or slipped in the period that included the Republican convention.

Continue ReadingNew Poll Shows Wider Clinton Lead, But It’s Not Over, Franklin Says

Strong Support for Marijuana Legalization in Law School Poll, But Results for Other Drugs Harder to Interpret

In the Marquette Law School Poll conducted earlier this month, fifty-nine percent of registered Wisconsin voters agreed that marijuana “should be fully legalized and regulated like alcohol.” Only thirty-nine percent disagreed.

Support for legalization in Wisconsin follows the recent decisions to legalize marijuana in Colorado and Washington in 2012, and in Oregon and Alaska in 2014. Nationally, support for legalization has grown steadily since the early 1990s and finally crossed the fifty-percent threshold in 2013. (On the local level, the Public Policy Forum published a thoughtful assessment of the costs of marijuana enforcement in Milwaukee earlier this year.)

In the Law School Poll, respondents were asked which arguments for legalization they found most convincing.

Continue ReadingStrong Support for Marijuana Legalization in Law School Poll, But Results for Other Drugs Harder to Interpret