|
|
|
|
Question Not Just How
People Will Vote November 2 But Who is Going to Vote?
Part Three of Four By Dave Andrusko As promised, your daily dose of political coverage as we are (hard as it is to believe) only eleven days from what shapes up to be a pivotal off-year election. There's so much to digest, I will try to make each bullet point comparatively brief.
The one exception will be the opening quote from a story in the Hill newspaper on October 19. It says a great deal about the situation of the House races. Under the headline, "Speaker Pelosi's 'majority makers' are facing possible electoral doom," Sean Miller writes, "Two-term Democrats, whose victories helped secure the Speaker's job for Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), are facing the possibility of a near-wipeout in the Nov. 2 election. Of 10 reelection races involving sophomore Democrats, Republican challengers are ahead in six and tied in two more, according to The Hill 2010 Midterm Election Poll.?The fact that these Democrats, dubbed 'majority makers' by Pelosi, are in jeopardy is a clear indication that the GOP has a good chance to run the House again after four years in the minority. Of 32 battleground districts polled so far by The Hill this fall, Democrats are leading in only three, with four races tied. Republicans are ahead in 25. Thirty of the 32 seats surveyed are now held by Democrats." The Obama factor. "A majority of voters in all 10 districts [represented by sophomore Democrats] had a negative opinion of Obama," Miller writes. "Overall, 69 percent of voters said their views of the president will be very or somewhat important when they cast their ballots -- a bad sign for Democrats. There is still a large pool of undecided voters, but that isn't necessarily a good thing for the Democrats, as most, [pollster Mark]Penn added, 'typically will swing against an incumbent in these situations.'" Tightening of races. Maybe yes, maybe no, and for sure, it depends. The tightening makes more sense in a place like Washington state where pro-life Republican Dino Rossi is closing in on pro-abortion Democratic Senator Patty Murray(he's never been that far behind) than it does in Pennsylvania where pro-abortion Democratic Congressman Joe Sestak is supposedly dead even with pro-life Republican Pat Toomey (whose lead has been in the high single-digits for weeks, if not months). Arguably the most interesting piece of political analysis to come out all week is under the headline, "Who's Going to Vote This Year?" Sean Trende does a marvelous job teasing out how many Democrats, Republicans, and Independents may vote November 2. http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2010/10/22/whos_going_to_vote_this_year_107686.html. Though very well written, it's a fairly complicated and lengthy analysis. Here's the bare-bones summary. Trende's analysis begins with the crucially important truth that when people are called by pollsters, almost all of them say they will vote but probably only about 40% will in an off-year election. So the trick is to screen out those who say they will vote but won't. The better a pollster does so, the more likely his or her poll results will track what actually happens. What makes it doubly hard is the "enthusiasm" gap, which wildly favored Democrats in 2008 but shows every evidence of being an advantage Republicans will enjoy in 2010. A moment later, after alluding to the differences among pollsters, Trende writes, "[T]hese pollsters don't disagree on how Republicans, Democrats and Independents are going to cast their votes. Instead, they disagree on how many Republicans, Democrats and Independents are going to cast their vote." And that depends (for reasons too complicated to go into here) on whether the pollster concludes that the electorate for 2010 "is slightly less Democratic than the 2008 electorate but more Democratic than 2004" --which would favor Democrats--or closer to what we saw "in the exit poll data from 2009, as well as other data pointing to a significantly more energized Republican party." If so, it would suggest that "the electorate this year may be far closer to 2004," Trende writes. If that be the case, "we could well see some Republican candidates outperforming the polls by 3-4 point margins similar to the results for Bob McDonnell in Virginia and Chris Christie in New Jersey last November," Trende concludes. Please send your comments on Today's News & Views and National Right to Life News Today to daveandrusko@gmail.com. If you like, join those who are following me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/daveha. |
