Obama’s New Voter Registrations in Pittsburgh

As I’ve written before, I think that the Obama campaign can do much better than current polling in southwestern Pennsylvania by further targeting the African-American and student populations in Pittsburgh. I also earlier wrote that new voter registrations among Democrats in Pennsylvania increased by slightly more than 65,000 from November to March. I went to Obama headquarters in Pittsburgh this afternoon to find out how they thought they were doing and get a sense of how large a slice of that 65,000 registration pie was Obama’s. I got nowhere on that front from campaign staff, so I walked, on a beautiful sunny day, six blocks around their campaign office in East Liberty and into eastern Shadyside.

During that walk, I spoke to 62 people and asked them their candidate preference, prior primary voting and the timing of their voter registration. Surprisingly, all but one person obliged. Did I mention that the sun was shining in Pittsburgh? The lone holdout in fact yelled at me “Don’t step on my dog!,” even though there was no dog. Anyway, of those 61 people, all but five planned on voting. Of those 56 voters, all but four planned to vote for Obama in April. Three of those four planned to vote for Clinton, because, they unanimously agreed, “We don’t trust men,” while the fourth hadn’t made up her mind. All four were lovely African-American ladies in their golden years.

Only 13 of the 61 people who didn’t yell at me had ever voted in a primary election before, and 19 of them had only registered to vote during this past year. Most of my survey (43) consisted of African-Americans, and there were more men (36) than women (25). I didn’t ask anyone their age.

It wasn’t a scientific survey by any means, but it is interesting. There was excitement among these folks and a lot of newly registered voters. The Obama camp just might be getting the lion’s share of those 65,000 new voter registrations.