Posted by Jed Lewison on Tue Jun 10, 2008 at 12:05 PM Pacific

Huckabee, Edwards fare best in SurveyUSA veepstakes polls

Since May 16, SurveyUSA has conducted polls in 17 different states testing the strength of eight different potential running mates, four for each candidate. While each poll is interesting on its own, I was curious the different tickets performed on average across all states, so I took all their results, dumped them into a spreadsheet, and built the table in this post.

The left side of the table shows groups the results by Democratic ticket and the right side groups them by Republican tickets. For each ticket, I show how that ticket performed on average against each individual ticket from the other party, as well as against the all the tickets, averaged together. (The data is the same on the left and the right, it is just grouped differently.)

For McCain's ticket, Mike Huckabee is the strongest VP candidate tested. He beat all the Obama tickets except for Obama-Edwards, leading by 4 points on average. Romney was next best, leading by 2.

For Obama's ticket, John Edwards is the strongest VP candidate tested by SurveyUSA. In fact, an Obama-Edwards ticket is the only ticket to lead any of the Republican tickets -- all other Obama tickets trailed, on average. Obama-Edwards led McCain by 7 points on average.

In a Obama-Edwards vs. McCain-Huckabee matchup, Obama-Edwards leads by 5 on average.

One thing to note is that McCain's VP field is a little stronger than Obama's; while Obama leads McCain without a VP, on average with the VPs, McCain leads Obama. This is probably because McCain's VP candidates are better known than Obama's.

In Michigan, SurveyUSA tested only one Republican ticket (McCain-Romney) against 10 different Democratic tickets. Here they are, ranked by performance. Since all the Democratic tickets lost, smaller is better, and Edwards again outperformed the field.

I've made no secret about my bias towards John Edwards. I know that he's said that he won't be the vice presidential nominee and I do not believe that he is actively pursuing it. On the other hand, I can't imagine that he would say no if he were asked, and these numbers suggest that at very least, he should be on the very short list of Obama's VP prospects.