The consensus from
Larry Sabato's Crystal Ball, and
Congressional Quarterly is that while the hotly contested IN-8 and IN-9 are up for grabs, and the IN-2 is one to watch, the rest of the state isn't a battle ground.
But while national pollsters are suggesting that the current state of voter backlash is such that Democrats could take anywhere from 1 to 2 dozen seats in House. The thing that they haven't realized yet as that the Republican's great divider, abortion, just isn't cutting it anymore. With President Bush at 46% among pro-life Hoosiers, and Gov. Daniels at 44% among pro-life Hoosiers the wedge is failing. The Indiana Republican Party is down, and it's time to kick them out.
On Tuesday, I laid out the
case for a Democratic landslide in Indiana. The national pollsters tell us that Democrats have the potential to pick up 3 seats in Indiana, but if the poll numbers for Bush and Daniel's are any indication, the whole state, save the doughnut of suburbs around Indianapolis in the IN-4 and IN-5 are up for grabs.
When the Republican Party controls every branch of government in Indiana, and they are losing pro-life voters, they are in serious trouble. As I pointed out on Tuesday, Barry Welsh's campaign (IN-6) ran a poll (with a heavy Republican bias, explained further in that piece) showing almost a third of voters undecided.
2006 IN-6 Congressional Race.
Do you plan to vote in November? (Non-Primary voters)
Frequency Percent
Yes 239 74%
No 84 26%
Total 323 100%
Do you plan to vote for Mike Pence, Barry Welsh, or are you undecided? (Likely voters)
Frequency Percent
Pence (R) 91 38.1%
Welsh(D) 72 30.1%
Undecided 76 31.8%
Total 239 100.0%
And this comes at a time when Bush and Daniels have taken a swan dive in Indiana polls, suggesting that the number of undecided voters will only grow as the election heats up. Barry hasn't had the money to make his name known in the district, for all intents and purposes this poll shows the performance of a generic Democrat against Pence in the fall election.
And this man is no generic Democrat.
Barry is a Methodist preacher, a union member twice over (IBEW and ISTA), and most importantly he's one of us. There are some who dismiss the chances of the man from Laurel, because they claim that Indiana is a red state populated by rednecks. As the collapse of support for Bush from pro-life voters shows, Hoosiers are on a road to Damascus, and they know it doesn't pass through Teheran.
There's an unverified rumor making its way around the state, that Pence's campaign ran an internal poll that showed him at numbers below those in Barry's (flawed) poll. From the stories told anonymously by staffers, Pence had something like a breakdown, raving on about how ungrateful people in the district were. All of this is unconfirmed, and should be taken with a grain of salt, but this tracks with the information that we have from Barry's polls and Pence's personality.
As anyone who's worked on a congressional campaign that took off with donors will tell you, one of the fundamentals of any successful campaign is a benchmark poll. It tells you were you are at with the voters, and it's something that's shared with high dollar donors to encourage them to donate, think of it as a donor's political prospectus. These polls are almost invariably kept internal to the campaign.
The problem is that a benchmark poll will set back a campaign anywhere from $15,000-$25,000 dollars if performed by a national pollsters with a reputation that will draw in the donors. Most campaigns will never have enough money to run a poll, and in a surge year like 2006, that means that dozens of campaigns are being written off because the only results on their viability are the election from last cycle. This costs us campaigns.
We need a poll in every district, and open source polling for every district. If we are going to have a Fifty State Strategy, we have to be honest where we stand. Polling isn't rocket science, and I think that we can both dramatically reduce the cost of polls, and greatly expand the number of districts polled by moving to an open source polling model. Polls of this type are not going to be given the same credence as polls by national professional pollsters, but they can demonstrate where we stand in each district.
The open source poll conducted by MyDD earlier this years demonstrated that open source polling, where the methodology is openly available on the internet is viable. However, the use of a professional polling firm greatly increases the cost of running a poll. I think that the time has come to take this a step further, and conduct opens source polls in all 435 congressional districts conforming to a national template.
The Universe
The average congressional district has 630,070 residents. This is not our universe. Most states have some kind of publicly available voter registration database, and this should be the basis of any open source poll. This is the group of voters that we want to sample.
The Sample
Lets say that in an average congressional district there will something like 500,000 registered voters. In order to get a margin of error of +- 5% you need a randomly selected sample of 384 voters. As I said earlier, most states have some sort of voter registration database, and most state parties have access to what's called a voter file that contains all the information that you provide when you register to vote. The key is finding a way to randomly select a sample of 384 from registered voters in the district.
The easiest method would be to find a way to assign a unique, sequential, integer to each registered voter in a congressional district, and then to use a random number generator to produce a list of 1000 numbers that produce a sample from the voter database. The reason why the sample list created has to larger than the final sample is so that if a voter is not available, or there is no phone number, etc you can move on to the next call to get your sample. It's very important, that those making the calls speak only to the person they have the name for. Just speaking to whoever answered the phone can introduce bias (in male dominated households, that can create a bias towards the choice for males, etc.)
The Template
Perhaps the greatest value of doing open source polling in every congressional district is that it provides an objective way to compare races that reflects the political situation of the present rather than the previous election cycle. In order for this to be workable, there has to be a relatively small number of questions that assess the state of race, without pushing those polled one way or another.
The call begins with a short one or two sentence introduction that should be careful to identify party.
Hello, I'm calling from the Open Source Polling Project. Would you be willing to answer a few questions about the Congressional race in your area? (Yes, No, No answer)
The first question assesses the poll participant's general mood about the state of the nation.
In general, do you feel that the nation is on the right track, or wrong track? (Right Track, Wrong Track, Don't Know, No Answer)
The second question asks whether they plan to vote.
Do you plan to vote in this year's election? (Yes, No, Don't Know, No Answer)
The third question measures voter identification of both candidates, no party identification is given.
Do you know who (Candidate name, rotate, repeat with other candidate's name) is? (Correct answer, Wrong Answer/ Don't know/No answer)
The fourth question asks who they plan to vote for in November. Party identification is only give if asked for. People who ask for party identification vote straight ticket.
Do you plan to vote for (Democratic candidate) or (Republican candidate) this year's election? (Rotate candidates names)
The call ends with a thank you.
Thank you for participating today in our poll.
The Cost
By having a national template that has been run in each district we can get a state of the nation at the district level, (which is after all how the House is won). By using people at the local level, this can greatly reduce the cost of running the poll. In order to produce scientifically valid results its very important that the workers doing the calls understand that there is no right or wrong answer (so as not to introduce bias, or argue with the polled voter), and that it is essential that they stick to the script, and talk only to the voter they have the name for. In order to maintain confidentiality, while the raw results would be available at no charge on the internet, anything that reveals the identity of polled should be deleted.
Assuming that it takes 10 minutes for a worker to complete one call after time after disconnected numbers, no answers, and refusal, that means it would take 64 man hours to complete a poll. Rounding that up to 70 man hours to account for the unforseen that means with 6 callers that would take about 12 hours grand total. Ran in 4 hour shifts 4PM-8PM that would take 3 days (for example Tuesday through Thursday.)
While volunteers could be used for this task, I think that paid staff making the calls inspires confidence, and allows you to stay on script better. If each caller is given $150 for their efforts, that translates out to roughly $10/hour if you include a short session introduction to polling to ensure sticking with the script, and proper polling techniques. So for an individual campaign, that translates out to $900 for a poll that gives a state of the district.
Spread over 435 districts that translates out to just under $400,000. While the framework. I've given is for implementation at the district level, there's nothing preventing this from being done at the national level (DNC). And there are bound to be economies of scale that result from a centralized approach. Either way, this provides a basic, but scientifically valid benchmark from which to run campaigns, and prioritize the allocation of campaign resources.
If we're serious about running a Fifty State Strategy, then the expense of conducting polls in every district is worth the cost. And if the Democratic Party publishes the results of polls it conducts, we can call for Republicans to do the same. And the chimera that Republicans have constructed with carefully crafted media messages and outright lies can be taken down once and for all. They can't say that they're winning when they're to scared to release the results from their own polls.