Stu Rothenberg: “President Obama is about to do what no president has done in the past 50 years: Have two horrible, terrible, awful midterm elections in a row. In fact, Obama is likely to have the worst midterm numbers of any two-term president going back to Democrat Harry S. Truman.”
Archives for November 2014
How to Tell Early if the Polls are Wrong
Sam Wang admits that everyone’s election forecasts “are, to an extent, built on sand. Historically, in any given year midterm polls have been off in the same direction by a median of 2 or 3 percentage points. Depending on the year, either Democrats or Republicans end up outperforming polls. In current poll medians, six races are within less than 2 percentage points: Alaska, Colorado, Georgia, Iowa, Kansas, and North Carolina. Therefore all six of these races could be won by Republicans…or all six could be won by Democrats.”
“The polls will be off, on average, by some amount in one direction or the other. Let’s call that average amount Delta. On Election Night, I will be watching returns carefully for clues about how large Delta is. In particular, I’ll be watching Kentucky and New Hampshire. Even though both races have a clear favorite, they have the advantage that voting ends fairly early in the evening. If either party outperforms polls in these states, that might indicate a broader trend nationwide.”
Why Don’t Democrats Vote?
A new Pew Research study shows that, among people who either aren’t registered to vote or are unlikely to vote in the 2014 midterm elections, 51% favor or lean toward the Democrats, while 30% favor or lean toward the Republicans — a 21-point gap.
The Fix: “With only a few exceptions over the last several decades, more Americans have identified as or leaned toward he Democratic Party than the GOP, according to data from Gallup. And Democrats even today often lead on the generic ballot among registered voters, but not likely voters. But, for Democrats, it’s not just the people who are registered to vote but choose not to; it’s also people who choose not to even register to vote.”
Democrats Are Counting on Women to Save Senate
New York Times: “Democrats are nervously counting on an enduring edge among female voters in most states to prevent a Republican rout in Tuesday’s elections. Yet so great is the uncertainty that even before the returns are in, some are second-guessing the party’s strategy of focusing more on issues like abortion and birth control than on jobs and the economy.”
“The danger for Democratic candidates is that their advantage among women could be so reduced by dissatisfaction with President Obama and the country’s course that it is not enough to offset Republicans’ usual edge among the smaller population of male voters.”
Can Rand Paul Attract Young Voters?
Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) “is preparing a 2016 presidential run based on a gamble that his libertarian policies can appeal to young people and minorities. And a poll out this week gave a big boost to Paul’s rationale for running,” Dana Millbank reports.
“The Institute of Politics at Harvard’s Kennedy School released a survey of millennial voters showing that this 18- to 29-year-old demographic, a rock-solid Democratic constituency a few years ago, is now up for grabs. If this is true, the Republican Party, in the right hands, might be able to defuse the demographic time bomb ticking at party headquarters.”
Begich Trails in Alaska
A new Rasmussen survey in Alaska finds Dan Sullivan (R) five points ahead of Sen. Mark Begich (D) in the race for U.S. Senate, 47% to 42%.
Technology Allows Campaigns to Track Voters
The New York Times reports on digital efforts to “track and chase” voters, “an integral part of the modern ground game. Now campaigns know where you eat, what you watch, what you read, where you work, if you commute — and are tracking it in real time, delivering specifically tailored messages to individual voters and hounding them until the ballots are cast. And in an election cycle with so many close races, the outcome, with control of Congress at stake, may turn on which party does the better job of, in effect, engineering the vote.”
“The use of this technology is not without risk. Its relentless and intrusive nature can quickly turn off voters, even though campaigns and committees on both sides work to address privacy concerns by making sure that at the individual level, each targeted voter remains anonymous.”
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