A strange thing is happening on the way to the 2014 election, the Democrats seem to be doing better than almost everyone expected. There are so many Democrats defending seats in states that went for Romney, this was going to be a wave election year for the Republicans. Of course, "it aint over till it's over".
Sam Wang who uses a A filtered poll has been pretty insistent that the Dems may be in trouble, but they're doing much better than people think. Here's his forecast for today.
Probability of Democratic+Independent control: 80% in an election today, 70% on Election Day.
But those that look at Fundamentals like, which party holds the presidency, what year of the presidency are we in, how popular is the president... are finding that their models have been shifting toward the Democrats lately.
At the NYT the upshot. their forecast went from about a 65% chance of Republicans taking the Senate, to 51% today.
And at FiveThirtyEight:
When we officially launched our forecast model two weeks ago, it had Republicans with a 64 percent chance of taking over the Senate after this fall’s elections. Now Republican chances are about 55 percent instead. We’ve never quite settled on the semantics of when to call an election a “tossup.” A sports bettor or poker player would grimace and probably take a 55-45 edge. But this Senate race is pretty darned close.
What’s happened? The chart below lists the change in our forecast in each state between Sept. 3 (when our model launched) and our current (Sept. 15) update.
So what's going on here? Well Sam Wang has rightfully been doing some
chest thumping as fundamental based models start moving toward his pure polling model.
From a polling standpoint, there was little genuine news over the weekend. However, other sites are moving toward the Princeton Election Consortium estimate. There are several likely reasons.
First, I spy several new Senate polls. None change the picture.
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Second, as the election approaches, other sites are decreasing the bias that they add by using fundamentals. This will inevitably make them approach the PEC snapshot, day by day. If everything converges on the PEC Election Day prediction, I would score that as an argument in favor of using polls only – or at least letting readers see the difference added by the use of fundamentals.
But Nate Silver has a different reason for why the polls are moving toward the Senate Democrats.
Might Democrats be benefiting from strong voter outreach in these states — perhaps the residue of President Obama’s “ground game” in 2012?
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Money could be a more important factor. Consider the states with the largest polling movement: In North Carolina, Hagan had $8.7 million in cash on hand as of June 30 as compared with just $1.5 million for her Republican opponent, Thom Tillis. In Colorado, Udall had $5.7 million as compared with $3.4 million for Republican Cory Gardner.
These totals do not account for outside spending. But in stark contrast to 2010, liberal and Democratic “super PACs” have spent slightly more money so far than conservative and Republican ones, according to the the Center for Responsive Politics. (One caveat for Democrats is that when money is spent on advertising, it can sometimes have short-lived effects.)
Interesting theory Nate. But when I go to the
Center for Responsive Politics and look at the spending by ALL groups, not just Super Pacs, we find that conservative outside groups have outspent Democrats by about 10%.
So maybe Nate rejected his first guess a little too fast. The Democrats have launched what they call the The Bannock Street Project which you might think of as Super GOTV in an effort to get the midterm electorate to look more like presidential years.
The Democrats’ plan to hold on to their narrow Senate majority goes by the name “Bannock Street project.” It runs through 10 states, includes a $60 million investment and requires more than 4,000 paid staff members. And the effort will need all of that — and perhaps more — to achieve its goal, which is nothing short of changing the character of the electorate in a midterm cycle.
Well it's pretty hard at this point to know what is really causing a shift in the polls. But if the Bannock Street Project is really the reason, it would be a nightmare scenario for Republicans. We've known for years that Democrats just don't turn out for midterm elections like Republicans. So the Democrats have a lot more to gain than Republicans when they sink their money into getting their people out to vote. This also explains the anti-democracy efforts of Republicans to stop people from voting.
If the Democrats are even a little successful at their efforts this year, they will learn how to do it better in future years. When you poll everyone, Democratic candidates and especially Democratic core issues, are overwhelmingly supported by the public. When you poll registered voters, the Dems still lead but by a smaller margin. When we count the vote on election day, the Dems usually struggle to win.
If the Democratic party is truly on to a method that gets more people to vote, the Republican party could very well become a minority party for decades into the future.
GOTV! GOTV! GOTV! GOTV!