The new swing state poll of Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania by Quinnipiac is just confusing. Sen. Rob Portman looks headed to defeat while Gov. John Kasich is more popular than ever. Sen. Pat Toomey looks like he’ll skip to a second six-year term regardless of who he faces among Democrats. Yet, Sen. Bob Casey is almost as popular. In Florida, Sens. Bill Nelson and Marco Rubio are about equally popular, although Rubio has both higher positives and higher negatives, yet the Republican governor is loathed and Democrats Patrick Murphy and Alan Grayson are both favored to win Rubio’s Senate seat, even as Obama is slightly less popular in the Sunshine State than in Ohio or Pennsylvania.
I don’t know what political show the American people are watching, but they don’t seem to have made up their minds about shit.
The American people might be tuning into the clown show going on in the Capital today.
Kevin McCarthy just pulled his name from the bid for Speaker.
Good times in the asylum.
It looks like the sample was people randomly on or off their meds.
And need I remind you, the election is still close to 13 months away.
Also, more people are doing what I do on calls from anyone (including pollsters) that I don’t know — hanging up.
I would investigate whether the opinion polling industry is slowly dying along with the political processs.
Thus, in those states where the “thinking” of a relatively small group of voters swings elections, you get this sort of inscrutable incoherence.
>To say Americans are massively ignorant of politics, processes and public policy is an enormous understatement.
This is so true, and such a crippling problem. If every voted and everyone paid attention, we’d have a drastically different country. The system is failing. And the worst of it is that a small extreme right minority is the only group that’s voting consistently and taking full advantage of how the system works.
If every eligible person did a small amount of research and voted, Congress and the Senate would have a democratic majority.
That Pennsylvania would re-elect Toomey is mass insanity – ignorance, actually.
The advantage of having political parties is that they broadly lump people into broad ideologies (maybe more narrowly in a true multi-party system).
American parties have not been this polarized since the Civil War.
How the fuck can people not realize this?
And yet, I honestly fear that a dysfunctional GOP House that lurches about like a drunken bull in a very small china shop will hurt Obama and the Democrats, because he’s president and leadership arglebargleblahblahblah.
How the fuck can people not realize this?
They recognized it, but there is no viable alternative.
Doesn’t seem confusing to me. Has internal and external validity.
Easy to forget that once Santorum slipped through to the Senate, it wasn’t easy to oust him. Portman may be vulnerable but Strickland is 74 years old.
Actually, Santorum was only re-elected once, and he lost his third campaign by 17 percentage points.
There’s a simple explanation here: Q-Pac’s numbers are bad, as they have been for most of the campaign.
Santorum was enough out of step with a majority in PA that it was a feat for him to get re-elected once. In a DEM wave election year against a big PA political name, he didn’t stand a chance for a second re-election. One or the other would likely have been enough to unseat him. Not seeing either on the horizon to defeat Toomey next year.
Q’s numbers are probably good at this point in the cycle.
Maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about, but if memory serves, Quinnipiac’s polling has historically been suspect outside of the Northeast (and really CT), hasn’t it?
In 2014, Q well in the Iowa and CO Senate races — and all the pollsters flubbed VA. Unlike other large pollsters, Q selects a few races to poll.
Track records for polling this far out are probably all okay if they’re viewed as setting an entering baseline for the race and not predictive of the actual results. The D/K in this poll for fav/unfav of incumbents is high. OTOH, all but Kane, Wolf, and Scott are in positive fav territory by good margins. And Kasich is sitting real pretty.
Its not just Qpac. Its everyone’s polls. They make no sense when you compare one item to another. Example:
Marquette, Wisconsin Primary, Oct 1
R Primary: Trump 21, Carson 20, Rubio 14, Fiorina 11
D Primary: HRC 42, Bernie 30, Joe 17
All good, right?
Trump vs HRC: HRC +14
Bush vs HRC: HRC +13
Rubio vs HRC: HRC +8
So, Trump beats Rubio by 7, but loses to HRC by 7 more than Rubio?
Bush is not even in double digit range (7) but is essentially tied with Trump in the general?
I’m sure that has something to do with general vs primary … and Unicorns are pink also.
Not inconsistent at all. What the Marquette poll is showing is that the Democratic front leader loses few D voters in the GE and picks up more of the Independents than Trump, Bush, or Rubio (the first two of whom have disaffected a large portion of the GOP base).
I would agree with you … except that there ARE no large numbers of “independent” voters anymore. Most of the people who claim to be independent are either Liberterian children or Republicans disgusted with the Tea Party.
There are a few independants who didn’t use to be Republican … but not many.
My informal guesttimate that the breakdown is:
35% GOP
5% IND/GOP
35% DEM
5% IND/DEM
17.5% IND
2.5% other
It will vary to some degree within states, but not by all that much. That hard 35% for both parties in mid-term elections with an broadly acceptable/popular incumbent can drop to 30%, (for example Nevada) but that’s more likely partisans staying home than showing to vote for their party’s dreadful nominee.
It’s not that the 17.5% are actually swingers; only that they swing a bit more than the IND/GOP and IND/DEM and rarely split 50/50. And the higher the percentage of IND swing in one direction, the more the IND/GOP/DEM will swing.
Wait.
Are you trying to build into the poll numbers sanity among Republicans?
Another way I’d put it, is, again, if Trump is the GOP nominee in 2016, he kills the GOP as a National party.
Apparently, so does Jeb?
As the last one left it on life support, might as well let a Bush finish it off.
This is only confusing if you believe in the fiction that people take issues into account when making voting decisions. At an early point in political identification, they do consider issues. However, once they make a choice of parties, issues become unimportant. At that point, it’s persona and image. Issues are not considered.
Sen. Pat Toomey looks like he’ll skip to a second six-year term regardless of who he faces among Democrats.
I find that hard to believe in a presidential year. Also, too, it’s really early.
Yes, it is early. But PA Democrats aren’t doing well right now. Whether it’s Kane or Kane and Wolf that are dragging them down (Casey’s poll numbers suggest that he’s also being impacted), 2016 isn’t going to be easy unless they find and correct the perceptual and policy issues and operational issues (if any exists) ASAP.
Why should they have? The elections you’re talking about won’t happen for more than a year.