Tag: Polls

Uber Pollster Nate Silver Says Democrats Could Hold Congress

Jon Ponder

photo-voting-boothsNate Silver at FiveThirtyEight.com writes, “While our forecast and a good deal of polling data suggest that the Republicans may win the House of Representatives on Tuesday, perhaps all is not lost for the Democrats. Here’s one possible scenario for how things might not end up as expected.”

Silver suggests that the GOP wave could sweep through the South taking out marquee Democrats like Reps. Alan Grayson of Florida and John Spratt of South Carolina, but diminish a little in the Midwest with key Democratic seats preserved in Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania, but continue to roll westward and take down Dems in Colorado but then stall in Nevada and evaporate along the Pacific Coast, where voters have not succumbed to tea bag fever. Democratic victories there could provide a firewall in which Dems hold the Senate and, narrowly, the House.

Admittedly, there is an element of whistling past the graveyard here but Silver’s suggestion that things may not be entirely as they seem is at least plausible.

Even so, if the likelihood that Dems could hold both houses of Congress is out there, why hasn’t it showed up in the polling? Silver lists five possible reasons:

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Two-Thirds Say Palin Unqualified for Presidency – Result Unchanged Since Spring

Pensito Editors

67%

Percent of all registered voters who view Sarah Palin as not qualified to be president, according to a new ABC/Washington Post poll — a figure that has not changed since spring. In an interview with Mary Hart on “Entertainment Tonight” yesterday, Palin all but acknowledged that she plans to run for president in 2012.

Two New Polls Show Dems Pulling Away in California

Jon Ponder

Taegan Goddard’s Political Wire:

A new Suffolk University poll in California shows Jerry Brown (D) with an eight point lead over Meg Whitman (R) in the race for governor, 50 percent to 42 percent.

In the U.S. Senate race, Sen. Barbara Boxer (D) leads by nine points over Carly Fiorina (R), 52 percent to 43 percent…

A new Public Policy Polling survey also finds Boxer leading by a 52 percent to 43 percent margin and finds Brown leading 53 percent to 42 percent.

Dems Gain 5 Points in Key House Races, Have $41 Mil, Twice GOP’s Cash – No Longer a ‘Death March’

Jon Ponder

graph-npr-midterm-10-2010From Rupert Murdoch’s GOP-Fox controlled Wall St. Journal:

The poll, for National Public Radio [PDF], found that in 58 Democratic-held battleground districts, 47 percent of likely voters preferred the Republican for Congress in their district, while 44 percent preferred the Democrat, a the percentage-point gap. The Republican lead was larger among voters with high levels of interest in the election. The GOP edge had been eight points in June.

New fund-raising numbers for the July-to-September period, due to federal officials at midnight Friday, could set the stage for the final dash to the Nov. 2 election.

The Democrats’ House committee on Friday reported $41.6 million in the bank, more than twice that of its GOP counterpart. Spending by non-party groups, such as labor unions and independent organizations, are backing up many candidates whose own bank accounts have run low.

Here’s analysis from Joe Conason at Salon:

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Polls Could Be Dialing the Wrong Numbers

Buck Banks

We’re all pretty sick of the relentless drumbeat of the MSM over the mid-term meme that the Dems are going to take a shellacking in November, right? How much of the doom and gloom is driven by poll numbers? Oh, I’d say about 90 percent, with a margin of error of plus or minus four points.

But what if the polls were wrong? What if, because of the way telephone polls are conducted, they were inherently biased toward more conservative results?

According to Pew Research, there’s a pile of stinking bias behind almost all of the telephone polls, and it’s even higher and stinkier behind the automated polls. The reason is simple — people who only have cell phones tend to be more liberal while people who have land lines tend to be more conservative. Pollsters conduct polls using land lines, and automated polls are strictly land lines; very few polls reach a significant percentage of cell phone users.

Pew conducts its polls using both land lines and cell phones, and has identified bias in other polls it says could be worse than in 2008, when it was first detected:

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Obama’s Approval 6 Points Higher Than Reagan or Clinton Three Weeks Out from First Mid-terms

Jon Ponder

graph-prez-approval-midterms-o-r-c

According to Gallup, Pres. Obama’s approval rating is now positive 48 percent to 46 percent. That’s a reversal from Sept. 8-9, when his approval/disapproval was 44/48, and a slight uptick from Sept. 16-17, when it was 47/46.

And you wouldn’t know it from listening to the vitriol coming from the corporate media and the GOP’s tea bagger base, but Pres. Obama is polling six percentage points ahead of presidents Reagan or Clinton three weeks out from their first mid-term elections:

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Poll: Nearly Half of Tea Baggers Are Christian Extremists

Jon Ponder

A year ago, the Republicans who astroturfed the tea party phenomenon were adamant that it was a secular “movement” focused on fiscal issues and not on the culture wars. At that point, there was disaffection between the party and its extremist base. The GOP brand had been damaged by the incessant bigotry and invective streaming from the religious right, while the evangelicals and others were disappointed that the GOP had made so little progress on its issues — restricting the right to abortion and the civil rights of gays, for example — during the 12 years it controlled Congress and the eight years of the Bush presidency.

Another unsurprising result: 60 percent of the GOP-tea bagger base say their most trusted source of news is the Fox channel, which broadcasts Republican Party propaganda.

Lately, however, the tea party candidates have been backing away from fiscal issues, the specifics of which are political nonstarters — and trotting out old “culture war” issues from the 1990s. Top Senate tea bagger Jim Demint of South Carolina recently revived his call for banning from the teaching profession women (but not men) who have premarital sex and gays. Five of the tea baggers running for Senate — Sharron Angle of Nevada, Ken Buck of Colorado, Joe Miller of Alaska, Christine O’Donnell of Delaware and Rand Paul of Kentucky — advocate using the government to force women to have babies, even when the father is the woman’s rapist or a family member.

It’s not surprising then that this new poll from the Public Religion Research Institute finds that nearly half of tea baggers are holdovers from the religious extremist base:

Eight out of ten Americans who identified with the Tea Party were Christians and 47 percent said they were part of the Christian conservative movement, the poll found.

But the grassroots movement (sic) remains a small part of the population overall. Christian conservatives make up 22 percent of the population but those who favor the Tea Party only comprise half of that, about 11 percent of the population. An overwhelming majority of Americans, 94 percent, who support the Tea Party movement were white men and more than half were 50 or older, according to the survey.

The poll found overwhelming support, 80 percent, for Sarah Palin, and 75 percent opposition to Pres. Obama.

Another unsurprising result: 60 percent of the GOP-tea bagger base say their most trusted source of news is the Fox channel, which broadcasts Republican Party propaganda.