Daily Kos/SEIU poll: Obama voters are still excited

With this week's DailyKos/SEIU/PPP poll conducted mainly on the Thursday and Friday after the debate last week, we might have expected excitement levels of Obama voters to plunge while the excitement levels of Romney voters surged, at least if the numbers followed the Conventional Wisdom narrative. Let's see what happened:

The proportion of Obama voters saying they were Very Excited remained essentially the same. Romney voters did increase, by seven points, in the percent of Very Excited. I will leave it to the reader as to whether to interpret that as a 'surge' or not.

Is the lack of change for Obama voters just because unexcited Obama voters changed into undecideds? No. From last week to this week, Obama's vote share changed from 49% to 47%. (I would note that by itself this is NOT a significant shift; only in the context of other polling showing a shift in the race on these same days is it meaningful.) If we assume that 2% change all went to undecided, and grab them back and call them Obama voters who are Not At All Excited (not a wise idea, but just for the sake of argument), then the Not At All Excited numbers rise about 4 points and Very Excited drops about 4 points. That still would not be a dramatic change in the context of the race. However, we may see continuing movement next week, as partisans respond to the polls released this week.

Moving away from recent events, it's interesting to see that excitement among Obama voters was lagging that of Romney voters pretty much all summer, and only began to grow in August. In September, Obama voters were more excited than Romney voters. Aside from the poor campaign narrative for Romney in September, the DailyKos poll also changed from a registered voter to a likely voter screen, which should have screened out some of the less enthusiastic voters. If that were the case, that could explain some of the increase in Obama supporter's enthusiasm, but then we can note that in contrast Romney supporters did not increase in enthusiasm as the likely voter screen was implemented.

What about some key components of the Obama coalition? We've sometimes seen the Conventional Wisdom that minorities won't be that excited to vote this year for Obama because history has already been made. Do the numbers bear this out? More below...