Nearly one-quarter of Arizona voters said they voted for John McCain because they were either against or afraid of Barack Obama, according to the latest Cronkite/Eight poll.

The poll, released Tuesday night, provided insight as to what prompted Arizonans to vote the way they did during the election.

According to the results, 48 percent of respondents voted for McCain and 40 percent voted for Obama.
The poll sampled Arizona 780 registered voters with a sampling error of plus or minus 3.5 percent.
Results showed another 22 percent of respondents who voted for McCain said they felt that he was a more experienced and qualified candidate.

“The McCain campaign spent a lot of time trying to make people fearful of Obama,” said Bruce Merrill, director of the poll. “He palled around with terrorists. Was he really a Muslim? Could you trust him? I think it’s just general unrest.”

Among voters who chose Obama for president, 18 percent said they did so because he represented change or was future oriented.

14 percent said they voted for him because they liked his image and because he was younger, confident and progressive.

Respondents were split as to whether or not McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin as a running mate hurt in the overall election.

Forty-seven percent of respondents felt Palin was either an excellent or good choice, but 47 percent also felt she was a bad or very bad choice.

Professor Kelly McDonald of ASU’s School of Letters and Sciences, an expert in communication and social influence, said Arizona’s cut lines were very similar to the national cut lines.

“Initially, there was very positive receptivity to [Palin], but her negative reception grew to almost 50 percent,” he said.

McDonald credited Palin’s decline in popularity to difficulty she had in talking about issues and potential tensions about her agenda.

Respondents were also asked to rank the job performance of several elected officials including President George Bush, Gov. Janet Napolitano and Arizona Secretary of State Jan Brewer.

42 percent of voters rated Bush’s performance as very poor, with 22 percent of respondents citing Bush’s policies and performance as president as the reason the Republican Party lost so many seats in Congress as well as the presidency.

The poll found 81 percent of voters said Napolitano was doing an excellent or good job, but more than half of respondents said they did not know enough about Brewer to rate her.

Merrill offered a possible explanation for the numbers.

“Nobody knows what the secretary of state really does. It’s a low visibility office,” Merrill said.
McDonald echoed Merrill’s opinion.

“Most Arizonans would probably be hard-pressed to describe what the state level responsibilities of a secretary of state are,” McDonald said.

Merrill said Brewer has done a lot in terms of modernizing Arizona’s voting system, but her office is not the kind where she regularly calls press conferences.

The poll also touched on how respondents felt about their financial situation.

More than one-quarter of participants said they expected their financial situation to grow worse in the upcoming year.

“It’s just a measuring of a very unsettled environment that exists out there about the economy,” Merrill said.

McDonald had similar views.

“There is certainly a national economic culture of pessimism,” he said.

More than half of respondents also said they would be spending less money for the holidays this year than they did last year.

“We’re caught in a spiral that’s material. People’s economic wellbeing is worse than it was a year ago,” said McDonald. “The tension that people feel about their economic future is palpable.”

Reach the reporter at deborah.bevers@asu.edu.