It's polls, polls, polls, and some climate change denial, in Orange to Blue race news today. Let's get to it.
Speaker Pelosi Project:
CA-46: Republican Gary DeLong, running against Alan Lowenthal in this newly redrawn district, decided to take a bold, if utterly ignorant, stand on global warming, telling the crowd at a community event in Orange County on Sunday, “I don’t see any scientific evidence that confirms it.” He continued by telling the crowd that “now is not the time” to address the climate crisis, but that people could always recycle more. Because that will sure fix this crisis.
FL-22: Lois Frankel is kicking some polling butt, says the DCCC. She's leading Adam Hasner by 10 points, 49-39. It's a Dem-friendly district, with President Obama also leading by 10 point, 53-43.
IL-13: The good news from the DCCC keeps on coming. They polled David Gill's race against Republican Rodney Davis (remember, this is the seat GOP Rep. Tim Johnson announced he was retiring from, after having won his primary). Davis has a fundraising edge, but the DCCC poll gives Gill a six point lead, 43-37. That's the same margin Gill had in internal polling in August, that pegged the race at 36-30.
Upgrade the Senate:
CT-Sen: Linda McMahon has been flailing in debates, but so far Chris Murphy hasn't broken out with a big lead. That remains true with a Siena poll released today, that puts the race at a statistical dead heat, with Murphy leading 46-44. McMahon is better known than Murphy, and largely disliked, but months of negative ads from McMahon have hurt his favorability. McMahon has a 41 to 49 favorability rating while Murphy’s is 36 to 45. She also has a five point lead among independents, and gets 21 percent of Democrats. Obama has a 15 point advantage here, 53-38, so hopefully he'll help pull some of those Democrats home down ballot.
MA-Sen: Elizabeth Warren's momentum continues. PPP polled early this week for the League of Conservation Voters, and has excellent news. She's leading 53-44, her biggest lead yet, three points better than PPP found last week, when she was ahead 50-44.
-Brown’s approval rating has dipped to just 46%, with 45% of voters unhappy with his job performance. Meanwhile Warren’s favorability numbers continue improving as the campaign progresses. 52% of voters now have a positive opinion of her to just 43% with a negative one.
-Warren is now leading Brown with both women (55-40) and men (50-48). She also has the advantage with voters in every age group. She’s cut Brown’s lead with independents almost in half over the last two months, from 26 points in August to now just 15 points. And she has the Democratic base pretty unified around her with 81% planning to vote
for her compared to only 14% who are siding with Brown.
OH-Sen: Sherrod Brown had a monster
fundraising quarter, in both amount raised and number of donors: $5.4 million from more than 100,000 people. As the campaign points that, that contrasts nicely with "the $23 million that’s been spent against Sherrod by secretly funded special interest groups."
WI-Sen: This is not happy-making news, however. The latest Marquette poll has Tommy Thompson completely recovering lost ground and now tied with Tammy Baldwin, 46-45. They had a 48-44 Baldwin lead at the end of September. However, Baldwin released her own internal poll showing her maintaining a lead, 48-44, not too different from her 50-45 mark last month.
Daily Kos for Marriage Equality:
- The Human Rights Campaign is keeping track, and finds that the Catholic Church is the top donor in fighting marriage equality in all four states in which it is on the ballot: Maine, Maryland, Minnesota and Washington.
According to the report from HRC, a gay rights group has spent $4.4 million across the four ballot states, while the Catholic Church has spent at least $1.1 million on efforts to oppose the measures. A significant portion of this money comes from the Knights of Columbus, a fraternal organization within the church, while other funds come from dioceses nationwide. The church's donations amount to roughly a quarter of the effort across the four states to fight same-sex marriage, and in Minnesota, the Catholic Church has funded more than half of the efforts to support the constitutional ban, according to HRC.
- Reuters has a good article on the difficulties of polling on this issue, and why none of the groups fighting for equality in these four states is taking good polling numbers for granted.
New York University professor Patrick Egan looked at polling from 1998 to 2009 and found opposition to same-sex marriage was underestimated by seven percentage points.
"The best guess about how polls translate into election results is to add just about all the people who say they are undecided to the share of people saying they're going to vote against gay marriage," Egan said in an interview.
"The shorthand is, unless the pro-gay marriage side is above 50 percent in the polls, then they have reason to fear that come election day they might find themselves on the losing side," said Egan, whose research was published in 2010.