Washington D.C. 5/21/2008 5:58:02 PM
News / Politics

Ralph Nader and Ron Paul As Third Party Candidates in California General Election Polls

USAElectionPolls.com has thrown its hat into the ring with respect to polling and is releasing their first ever results, first up: California.

USAElectionPolls.com used registration based sampling and conducted their poll using IVR methodology. They found that in either hypothetical matchup of McCain vs Clinton or McCain vs Obama, they found that the sum of the support for Ralph Nader and Ron Paul were at 9%.

The Libertarian party is choosing their presidential and vice-presidential nominees this week and Ron Paul will not be one of them. But Ron Paul was used to gauge the maximum amount of support a Libertarian candidate would garner at this point in time. Once a libertarian candidate is established, USAElectionPolls.com will be polling the support of that candidate.

The support that McCain-Obama get and McCain-Clinton get in their California poll jived very closely with the results of other pollsters. It was the support of Nader and Paul that was surprising and not generally included in the polls. According to Bhatta of USAElectionPolls.com, "by not polling all of the potential candidates, pollsters marginalize them and diminish their ideas whether they have traction or not. This causes voters who may ordinarily vote for them choose to support a candidate in one of the big tent parties so as to not be a 'spoiler'"... Bhatta goes on to continue "but what the media does not realize is that if voters knew their candidate had a strong backing and enough support, it would mobilize their base and take them out of the spoiler category... just remember 5% is alll that is needed to achive federally distributed funding in 2012."

The full results can be found:

> California General Election Poll