President Barack Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney remain locked up in the key battleground swing state of Florida, according to new polling data commissioned by Due Diligence American Edition.
Each candidate shares support in Florida at 48 percent among likely voters, the poll revealed, leaving a mere 4 percent of the electorate “undecided” in the race for Florida’s 29 electoral votes.
The Due Diligence commissioned Illumination Multimedia, a non-partisan public polling and media consulting firm to survey likely voters in Florida. Illumination used an automated calling and response system to poll a sample size of 745 likely voters in Florida.
The overall results were calculated to have a margin of error of 3.7 percent. Calling started on Sunday, Oct. 21 and ended Monday, Oct. 22.
While the candidates are evenly split in popularity over the electorate as a whole, different segments of the population heavily favor one over the other, as seen in the following graphic. Mitt Romney clearly wins among white voters who favor the former governor 55 to 41 percent.
African-Americans, on the other hand, overwhelmingly favor President Obama 79 to 17 percent.
Hispanics are more evenly split with 49 percent favoring the president and 44 percent planning on voting for Mitt Romney. However, results also found that Cuban-Americans slightly preferred the Republican candidate while non-Cuban Hispanics prefer the president over a significantly wider margin.
Unlike in Due Diligence’s recent polling in North Carolina where younger voters were more evenly split between Obama and Romney, those between the ages of 18 and 29 lean towards the president by 26 percentage points (53 to 37 percent), as seen in the following graphic.
However, 11 percent of those young voters are still undecided or voting for third-party candidates.
On the other end of the spectrum, older voters favor the Republican nominee by 7 percentage points. In between, voters are more evenly divided with 48 percent of those between the ages of 30 and 49 voting for Obama (compared with 47 percent for Romney) and Romney leading only marginally with those between the ages of 50 and 64 (50 to 47 percent).
While female voters are not as strongly in Obama’s camp as has been seen before, the president still leads among women 50 to 46 percent, a marginal lead within the margin of error for that particular subset. In similar fashion, Romney leads among men by the same ratio with 49 percent of the male vote compared to Obama’s 45 percentage points.
The poll also reflects slightly higher party enthusiasm for Romney with 87 percent of Republicans resolute in their preference for their party’s candidate compared to only 83 percent of Democrats who plan on voting for their candidate Obama, as seen in the final graphic below.
Romney is also maintaining a significant lead among independents leading among those unaffiliated with a party or registered with a third-party by 6 percentage points (48 percent to 42 percent).
You can download these results here:
