Last night I stumbled across a fantastic interview of Sam Wang from the Princeton Election Consortium on Up With Steve Kornacki on October, 19. Some pearls of wisdom from Wang:
On election day, candidates with a polling lead of 3 percentage points or less, have a 1 in 3 chance of losing.
"Midterm polling is actually remarkably bad compared with presidential years, and its possible for all the polls to be off by up to 3 points in either direction."
The chart at the top of the diary is from today's blogpost at PEC. There are 7 senate and 11 governor's seats within three percentage points! Applying Wang's first pearl, that's 18 races where the candidate leading in the polls has a 1 in 3 chance of losing, or conversely the trailing candidate has a 1 in 3 chance of winning.
Now consider Wang's second pearl, that midterm polling is less accurate than presidential year polling. In 2010 (as you can see in the chart above) there were three senate races that were polling within a three point margin immediately prior to election day. The states, the opposing candidates, RealClearPolitcs polling average as of 11/2/2010, and the results are below.
Washington -- Patty Murray vs. Dino Rossi -- Murray up 0.3% -- Murray wins by 3.8%
Colorado -- Bennet vs. Buck -- Buck up 3% -- Bennet wins by 0.9%
Nevada -- Reid vs. Angle -- Angle up 2.7% -- Reid wins by 5.6%
The democratic candidates won all of the races that were within 3 percentage points. Bennet and Reid came from behind to do it. The polls did not predict the turnout in those two races, and it was a robust ground game in Colorado and Nevada against a red wave no less, that made a difference.
The take home message: We have a chance to win in each of these 7 senate and 11 governors races! And we can all do something simple, and virtually pain free to help!
More below the squiggle.
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