For all the reasons I have stated before, Nate Cohn agrees that if the polls are off in any direction, it is far more likely that they are overstating the Republicans’ advantages than the Democrats’. Unfortunately, the kind of errors that pollsters are likely to make are minimized in this election for several reasons. Most of the competitive races are taking place in states with small Latino populations (Colorado being the most glaring exception). The hardest to reach voters are precisely the ones least likely to vote, particularly in a midterm election. This includes highly mobile people, exclusive cell phone users, urban dwellers, college students, young people, and people on the margins of society. It also includes people for whom English is a second language, which is a group larger than just Latinos. These voters are heavily Democratic and they are likely to be underrepresented in polls, but the fewer of them that there are, the less of a skew will result.
In other words, the same factors which led pollsters to underestimate the size of President Obama’s reelection victory are still largely in play despite legitimate and concerted efforts to address them, but the size of the error is going to be less even if the problems have not been corrected.
This means that Democrats hoping to see an across the board result far better than predicted are probably going to be disappointed. Some states, like Colorado, still have the potential to greatly defy expectations, both because it has a large Latino population and because they’ve changed their voting process to a mail-in format. But most other states don’t have this same potential, or have it to a much smaller degree.
Races polling within the margin of error are going to be competitive, but don’t expect too many results this time like Harry Reid’s four years ago.
I hear that the GOP candidates are trying to “reach out” to women voters, moderating their anti-choice, anti-birth-control, anti-woman stances.
From the behavior in CO, I’d guess that they finally internalized the analysis after Romney’s defeat, and adopted a MOAR LYING strategy, but putting off the lying to the last couple of weeks, so that the media (and hopefully, the voters) don’t catch on and call them on it in time.
Sam Wang has the election at 55%-45% (in favor of a Republican takeover):
http://election.princeton.edu/
We don’t need a polling miracle to win. All we need is for a slightly weighted coin to come up tails.
I’m not saying it’s going to happen. But it wouldn’t be a miracle if it did.
Guy Cecil has a stiff upper lip.
The current prediction as I understand it is running around 52 R – 48 D with Mitch McConnell getting re-elected.
We know that 27 states have caged up to 7 million registrations through loose application of a software program called cross-check that has search on duplicate names like Garcia, Martinez, Jackson, Singh, and Patel to “enforce laws against voter fraud.” We know that the Secretary of State of Georgia is slow-walking processing of another 40,000 new voter registrations.
We know that the national media are now so corrupt that they actively work for the Republican Party by making statements about which candidates are qualified (Joni Ernst) and disqualified (Allison Lundergran Grimes).
We know that DC Democrats play games with Democratic candidates, even deciding to support independents to ensure that only moderate Democrats and not progressives make it through the election.
And we know that progressives can never unify enough to bust the Republican Party but libertarians and Republicans can unify enough to stop a Democratic challenger.
And we know that if these results play out that if you don’t have money you might as well not vote because you will never ever see your interests represented, thanks to Citizens United.
And we know that President Hillary Clinton is inevitable.
The public is easily panicked by ISIS-ebola-Obama-Guantanamo chanted repeatedly by inane ads.
And trick or treat, the totals are not in until next Tuesday night and following. Five full days of getting out the vote left. A last minute GOTV blitz in five days is what Karl Rove did in 2004 to hide the theft of Ohio.
From a strategic standpoint, the analysis that matters is whether it is possible to turn out 50 more votes per precinct in a midterm than in the previous midterm. And how close to Presidential levels that brings you. And what the election results are in the states that tried to do that. Georgia is the test case here. And the test is whether that sort of intense GOTV can overcome high-level voter suppression.
The test for 2016 is whether Democrats have the guts to primary incumbents in order to introduce new thinking and new energy into the party. All current indications say that Democrats will be as primary-averse as ever and that the DC Democrats will try to squash any new energy.
Thanks for the insights. Not sure I am as quite as cynical as you about Dems, but I do acknowledge your broad and deep knowledge of matters political, particularly Southern ones.
Interesting about Georgia being a test case for GOTV. I am part of that and am physically canvassing voters with a partner in primarily AA neighborhoods, many of which are quite blighted. Neighborhoods that 20 to 30 years ago were working class white neighborhoods. The latter moved north or to one of the adjoining counties. We are targeting only registered voters (from the list we are provided by the Michelle Nunn campaign mostly), but my partner and I are engaging anyone we see mingling outside and that happens a lot.
Am canvassing every day, even including election day itself. Got a robo call from the Ga Republican party a half hour ago (My husband is not politically affiliated and is known to vote Republican on occasion). The call urged us to go out and early vote and that early voting by Democrats was heavy.
Must note, too, that hubby flipped on CNN a bit ago and the conversation was about Nunn and Perdue in Georgia. The CNN anchor commented to the guests how interesting that Georgia had so rapidly moved from a state that Democrats hoped to turn purple/blue to one that they had to have in order to retain control of the Senate. Those 40,000 votes that Secy Brian Kemp is slow walking may indeed be very crucial.
I’ve decided the best way for me not to get too depressed about Tuesday is to do something positive and constructive. May not change the outcome, but it’s far more enjoyable. However, I always come to this place to read Booman and you and a couple of other commenters. The other thing is that contemplating 6 years of David Perdue is just horrifying. So this election is not just about Dems getting their turn to run the tables in 2016, it’s about getting some decent constructive representation for my state.
Getting people the information about where to vote and their commitments to vote and identifying child care or transportation of other issues that might impede voting are critical in the last few days. And you folks better be geared up to do it all over again in adverse weather in a runoff. Hopefully the Nunn campaign’s scripts ask about getting voters out for a runoff.
And for your own sanity, keep the TV off until November 5. CNN is working overtime to swing the vote. So is Chuck Todd. The national media are completely corrupt.
This election was about taking down the Republicans. It is now become another Democratic firewall election.
So much engagement and activism at the grass roots and so little to show for it in DC. I hope that canvassing is as strong and extensive in the rest of Georgia.
Thanks for doing the heavy lifting in one of the states in which Democrats are recovering a sense of how to win.
I read all your comments here, and wish you’d post elsewhere. But, sometimes, your comments just punch at that gut, gotta say thank you.
Unfortunately, Booman has hit the nail on the head. During 2012, the polls consistently had the Prez ahead by 1 or 2 points in the contested states. By consistently, I mean, ALWAYS. The result is obvious.
You don’t have to believe the polls, you can hope with all your heart that coin is weighted too much, but as my daddy told me once:
“Son, the race is not always to the swiftest, and fight is not always to the strongest … but if you bet any other way you’re a damn fool.”
Don’t forget that Nate Silver got 3 important races very wrong in ’10. His word is far from gospel.
So we’re depending on his word instead of his model now? What I see when I look at Nate’s site are the narrow or wide gray bands and where they are. That shows the variance among the runs in his model. For some sets of runs the model has a very narrow variance. There is one race that has a very wide variance. The probability numbers are just the area under the bell curve to the left or right of the vertical 50% line.
I hope we are looking at models here and discussing gospel. Silver’s data shows. Silver’s words you can mostly ignore except when he describes how the model works.
Of course the model can get the red-blue calls wrong, up to 5% or 10% of the time. That’s 5-10 races out of a hundred or 3-4 out of 33.
Also, the numbers don’t know the concept of “importance”.
Here:
http://elections.nytimes.com/2010/forecasts/senate
f course the model can get the red-blue calls wrong, up to 5% or 10% of the time. That’s 5-10 races out of a hundred or 3-4 out of 33.
It’s worse. Why? Because some races aren’t seriously contested. The contested races are what matters.
The model doesn’t know contested or uncontested unless there it is programmed to look for it and adjust.
He got Nevada, Colorado, and Alaska wrong as best I can tell. And was 1 off on the overall Senate composition. The close races will be more likely to be contested.
From a campaign perspective, that’s not a happy result. But that is the limits of polling. Moreover those limits affect different polling houses differently.
One of the reasons that I’m not obsessed with polls. The races that matter are the very ones the poll is most likely to get wrong only because they are the closest to the 50% line.
The failure of races to be seriously contested is a political strategy issue that is much more important for any party that pretends to be a national party.
That is much easier done when it is policy issues that are the differentiator instead of ideological alignment, or worse as is the case this year nothing really beyond branding and team loyalty.
Here in Colorado the GOP could do a clean sweep. If that happens forget the mail-in ballots – we’ll have vote caging, unreliable machines in Democratic precincts, etc. Democrats critically need minority and low income voters to win here – the GOP could own this state for the foreseeable future with a win next week.