Maybe it’s just statistical noise, but there’s been something of a turnaround in the generic vote polls.
The generic vote question, for those who are not political insiders, asks voters which party’s candidate they will vote for in elections for the House of Representatives. Over the last 20 years Republicans have tended to run a bit better in actual elections than they do in the generic vote question, but this tendency may have been reduced in recent cycles. In addition, Republicans have an advantage in House elections due to demographics and, to a lesser extent, redistricting. Democratic voters tend to be clustered in central cities, sympathetic suburbs and university towns. Republican voters tend to be spread around more evenly in the rest of the country.
Thus in 2012, Democrats won the popular vote for the House 49 to 48 percent (with two-thirds of their popular vote margin coming in California races, which under that state’s current system had candidates of only one major party running). But Republicans won 234 seats to Democrats’ 201. That was not far out of line with presidential voting: Mitt Romney carried 226 districts and President Obama 209. There were fewer split districts, voting for president of one party and congressman of the other, than in any election since 1920.
The upshot of all this is that any lead for the Republicans in the generic vote suggests a pretty solid Republican majority of the popular vote and of House seats in the general election.
It’s probably significant then, that in the current realclearpolitics.com average of recent polls, Republicans lead Democrats 45 to 43 percent in the generic vote. (I’ve rounded off the figures; if you take them to tenths, as RCP does, it’s 45.0 to 43.4 percent.) That’s something of a reversal: Democrats had been leading, by about 1 percent, in the RCP average since May, and Republicans led in only two polls of 26 polls conducted between April 20 and July 26. In contrast, Republicans have led in the generic vote in six of seven polls conducted wholly or partially since Aug. 20.
What happened on Aug. 20? That was the day American journalist James Foley was beheaded by Islamic State of Iraq and Syria terrorists. Any connection? Well, correlation is not causation — the difference in pre- and post-August results are of limited statistical significance — the shift, if it is that and not just statistical noise, is not very large.
The USA Today poll conducted by the justifiably respected Pew Research Center between Aug. 20 and 24 showed Democrats with a 47 to 42 percent lead in the generic vote (but note also that this was a poll of registered voters, while the other four polls in the RCP average are of likely voters, typically a more Republican group).
Moreover, as I suggested in a recent blog post, there are not many districts which look flippable: Obama won 60 percent of the vote or more in 127 of the Democrats’ current 201 districts and between 55 and 59 percent in 42 more. Even so, Republicans’ chances of winning 243 seats — 1 more than they did in 2010 and more than in any election since 1946 — look a little better than they did a couple of weeks ago.
