Politics

Those of us hoping to get a good night’s sleep on Nov. 2 might not be pleased with the latest developments in the Alaska Senate race, where polls suggest a drop in support for the Republican nominee, Joe Miller. That could enable either Lisa Murkowski — the incumbent who lost the Republican primary to Mr. Miller but is running a write-in campaign as an independent — or perhaps the Democrat Scott McAdams, to win the race instead.

Most polling places in Alaska do not close until midnight, Eastern time. And vote-counting is always slow in the vast and remote state, which also has a high rate of absentee voting. The presence of a viable write-in candidate will create further delays, since these ballots will need to be reviewed by hand — election night counts may report the total number of write-in votes, but not how many of these were valid ballots cast for Ms. Murkowski. And once an initial count is in, a series of legal challenges may arise over different standards for counting the write-in votes. It’s plausible that the identity of Alaska’s new senator might not be known for weeks or even months.

The clearest path to victory had seemed to be Mr. Miller’s — since he does not have the handicap of being a write-in, like Ms. Murkowski — or, like Mr. McAdams, a Democrat in a state with few Democrats. But polls suggest that voters have grown less fond of Mr. Miller. A Rasmussen Reports poll issued late last week gave Mr. Miller 35 percent of the vote, down from 42 percent a month ago. Another survey, from Public Policy Polling, also had his vote-share decreasing, and found that 58 percent of Alaskan voters have a negative impression of him, up from an already-high 52 percent after his primary win. Read more…

Raúl M. Grijalva. Bennie Thompson. Jan Schakowsky.

Jim Oberstar? John Larson? Corrine Brown?

Peter DeFazio! John Dingell! Barney Frank!

These are some of the Democratic incumbents, most long believed to be safe by analysts. But in recent weeks, polls of their districts have suggested surprisingly competitive races.

Some of these polls show the Republican challengers leading; most show the Democrat ahead, but by a smaller margin than expected. Some of the polls are from independent researchers; most are issued by the campaigns themselves, or by other Republican-affiliated groups. Some of the companies conducting these polls have strong reputations; others have little track record.

What these polls have in common, however, is that each time one is issued, they make Republicans very excited — and Democrats very nervous. It’s time for a more sober look at them. Read more…

FiveThirtyEight’s projection for the U.S. House shows little change from last week. Republicans are given a 73 percent chance of taking over the House, up incrementally from 72 percent last week. During an average simulation run, Republicans finished with 227 seats, up from 226 last week; this would suggest a net gain of 48 seats from the 179 they hold currently.

However, there is considerable uncertainty in the forecast because of the unusually large number of House seats now in play. A gain of as large as 70-80 seats is not completely out of the question if everything broke right for Republicans. Conversely, if Democrats managed to see a material rebound in their national standing over the final two weeks of the campaign, they could lose as few as 20-30 seats, as relatively few individual districts are certain pickups for Republicans.

In past weeks, we have written about the divergence between the various indicators that the model uses — for instance, the generic ballot, as compared against polls of individual districts. Increasingly, however, these metrics are falling into alignment.

Some generic ballot polls have shown incremental improvement in Democrats standing — although they still trail by roughly 6 points among likely voters on the generic ballot, according to our model’s estimate. According to one commonly used formula, a Republican lead of 6 points on the generic ballot would translate into a gain of about 50 seats. Read more…

There’s been some excitement this week about Pennsylvania, where two internal polls commissioned by Democrats show a tight Senate race. One of the polls actually puts their candidate, Joe Sestak, ahead by 3 points; the other has him 1 point behind Pat Toomey. Further contributing to the buzz is the disclosure that Republicans are upping their ad buys in the state. On the other hand, Rasmussen Reports provides for a buzzkill of sorts, having released a poll this morning showing Mr. Toomey 10 points ahead — the largest advantage that Rasmussen has given him all year.

Our forecast yesterday evening, which did not yet include the Rasmussen poll (nor the internal polls; we do not use them in our Senate predictions), showed a projected 7-point victory for Mr. Toomey and gave him a 92 percent chance of emerging as the victor. None of the new information would lead me to deviate greatly from that forecast.

The internal polls. I’m not sure why people take polls released by campaigns at face value. This does not mean that campaigns don’t have very good pollsters working for them. But the subset of polls which they release to the general public is another matter, and are almost always designed to drive media narrative. For an instructive example, Google the term “internal polls”: the first result is a blog post, circa late October 2008, entitled “McCain’s Internal Polls Looking VERY Good.” Read more…

On Wednesday, Pew Research issued a study suggesting that the failure to include cellphones in a survey sample — and most pollsters don’t include them — may bias the results against Democrats. Pew has addressed this subject a number of times before, and in their view, the problem seems to be worsening. Indeed, this is about what you might expect, since the fraction of voters who rely on cellphones is steadily increasing: about 25 percent of the adult population now has no landline phone installed at all.

Clearly, this is a major problem in survey research — and one that, sooner or later, every polling firm is going to have to wrestle with. What isn’t as clear is how much of a problem it is right now.

I have written about this in the past, and I encourage you to review those articles. But let me try and come at it from a couple of fresh directions. Read more…

After having lost ground in the Senate forecast for three consecutive weeks, Democrats have demonstrated improved polling in several key matchups over the past week, dimming Republican hopes for taking over the chamber.

The FiveThirtyEight model now gives Republicans an 18 percent chance of claiming control of the Senate after the Nov. 2 elections — down from 24 percent last week. The projected composition of the Senate has also changed slightly: more than 100,000 simulation runs of the forecast model show the Democrats finishing with an average of 52 senators, up from 51.5 last week, and Republicans with 47.9 senators, down from 48.4 last week.

It would be dubious to assert that Democrats have some “momentum” at the national level — pollsters have released surveys in dozens of matchups for the House this week, for instance, and they continue to be broadly in line with large (potentially very large) Democratic losses in that chamber.

Control of the Senate, however, will boil down to a relatively small number of races — possibly not more than a half-dozen. And in several of those races, Democrats have made small, but important, gains: Read more…

Washington State plays a pivotal role in the battle for the Senate this year, since the Republicans’ path of least resistance runs right through it. Were Republicans to win the three contests that can be described as tossups — in Illinois, Nevada and West Virginia — and avoid surprises in other states like Colorado and Kentucky in which the polling is still fairly close, then a victory by Dino Rossi in Washington would give them their 51st senator.

But if Patty Murray, the Democratic incumbent wins, the Republicans’ task would be much tougher: they’d have to win a state like California, where the polling has run against them of late, or one like Connecticut, where there are probably too few undecided voters to give their nominee, Linda McMahon,  the victory even under best-case assumptions. We’ve sometimes used the phrase tipping point state to describe a state that will make or break a party’s electoral fortunes, and it may be Washington in this case.

The inconvenient thing about Washington State, however, is that the polling there has been all over the map. Read more…

Although we’ve been skeptical about the notion that the overall political environment has improved by any discernible margin for Democrats, there are some exceptions in gubernatorial elections around the country. In recent weeks, Democrats have moved into the lead in the gubernatorial race in California, while closing their deficits in other states where they once trailed badly. Likewise, while there were relatively few shifts in this week’s gubernatorial polls, the exceptions generally benefited Democrats.

In Oregon — a race that has received little attention from pollsters — a Rasmussen Reports poll shows the Democrat, the former Gov. John Kitzhaber, moving into a 2-point lead over Republican Chris Dudley, a former professional basketball player. This reflects a reversal from the past three Rasmussen Reports polls, which had shown Mr. Dudley with leads ranging from 3 to 5 points. The result is also consistent with other recent polling data which suggests that Democrats may be suffering less on the Pacific Coast than in other regions of the country. The forecasting model now regards Mr. Kitzhaber as a nominal, 56 percent favorite. Read more…

Megan Liberman and I talked about the horse-race aspects of West Virginia in today’s TimesCast: suffice it to say that, from an electoral perspective, it’s as important a state as any in terms of Democrats’ ability to hold the Senate.

But — although it’s easy to forget it this time of year — winning elections is, in theory, just a means to an end, the end being the ability to affect public policy. And this is where the Democrats’ nominee in West Virginia, Gov. Joe Manchin III, poses problems for them.

Even though West Virginia voted Democrat for president 14 out of 17 times from 1932 to 1996, it was never some bastion of liberalism. Instead, Democrats would accept defections from the state’s elected officials on some issues — like social and environmental policy — in exchange for party-line voting on economic affairs, and matters like labor organizing rights.

It’s not surprising, then, that a Democrat like Mr. Manchin opposes abortion, gun control and gay marriage, and is shooting bullet holes, literally, in the Democrats’ cap-and-trade bill, which might create problems for West Virginia’s coal-based economy. Mr. Manchin knows his state (and he looks a heck of a lot better sporting a gun than, say, Michael Dukakis looked in a tank). Read more…

Nate Silver appeared in the first installment of The Caucus, a TimesCast segment offering daily insight into what’s shaping the midterm elections. Nate spoke with The Times’s Megan Liberman on the latest in the West Virginia Senate race, and how the results of this surprisingly competitive contest could affect the make-up of the Senate.