The Geek Vote

Color me surprised:

Security moms are so 2004; if you're looking for a trendy swing demographic in the 2008 election cycle, consider those politically-engaged, online donation-making IT professionals. A new survey from the Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA) plumbs the views of the IT crowd and finds John McCain and Barack Obama in a dead heat for the geek vote.

According to the survey of 600 IT workers, which was conducted for CompTIA by Rasmussen Reports, McCain and Obama would each have won the support of 29 percent of respondents had the presidential election been held in early March. Hillary Clinton, at 13 percent, only narrowly edged out Mike Huckabee (11 percent) and scrappy libertarian Ron Paul (9 percent). A further 9 percent declared themselves undecided.

I work with a lot of geeks and most of them are flaming liberals. Maybe that has more to do with working in the Peoples Republic of Massachusetts than they being geeks.

It is a micro-poll, but interesting none the less.

This is thought provoking as well:

On the other side, a recent Pew poll found that Democratic-leaning voters who support Hillary Clinton were more likely than Obama voters to cross the aisle and support John McCain if their preferred candidate lost the nomination—though given the skewed racial and economic composition of the IT sector, inferences from general population polls should be drawn cautiously.

I wonder how many other professional sector polls occur.