Where’s why polls are not determinative of electoral outcomes. You knew that Richard Blumenthal misled people repeatedly into believing that he served in Vietnam, and you knew that his opponent Linda McMahon had truckloads of money. Did you not think she’d use that money to flood Connecticut with negative ads highlighting Blumenthal’s lies?
McMahon has her own glaring flaws and Blumenthal still has good odds of winning this race, but the polls taken prior to McMahon’s ad campaign were only meaningful in the sense that they provided some evidence that Blumenthal had a big enough cushion that he might be able to withstand the coming onslaught. There’s a reason that some pundits expected Blumenthal to drop out when the Vietnam revelations hit despite him having a nearly twenty-point advantage in the polls.
We didn’t know that Meg Whitman had an undocumented worker problem, but that revelation has rendered prior polls meaningless, as well. And, as First Read notes, a collapse by Whitman could lead to catastrophe for Carly Fiorina and other downticket Republicans in California, rendering their poll numbers meaningless.
There’s a limit to how much television advertising can move poll numbers, but that’s not true about the devastating ad. It’s very difficult to create a devastating ad without some underlying facts that are devastating. But that’s where the Democrats have good news. As I detailed in my Republican House of Horrors piece, the Republicans have fielded a slate of rogues and scoundrels and rank hypocrites who are unusually vulnerable to the devastating advertisement.
Does anyone think that polls of the George Allen-Jim Webb race were meaningful in the week after the ‘Macaca’ moment but before the people of Virginia had been deluged with that footage?
You have to consider that even the Republicans in Washington considered half of these candidates to be unacceptable. They are only reluctantly supporting Ken Buck and Joe Miller and Christine O’Donnell and Rand Paul and Marco Rubio and Sharron Angle. They weren’t their first choices for a reason. All of them are vulnerable to the devastating ad.
