1. Senate Races Get Closer. Public Policy Polling made big headlines yesterday with a poll showing Democrat Joe Sestak in the lead over Pat Toomey in the Pennsylvania Senate battle. Last week, Hotline On Call noticed the NRSC starting to amp up its commitment to Toomey. Late last night, a new Muhlenberg College/Morning Call poll also finds him in the lead.
Pennsylvania thus joins a number of races that have tightened noticeably in the last few weeks. A Republican lead in Colorado has been cut down.
Ditto a GOP lead in Kentucky.
On the flip side, however, we have seen a Democratic lead in Washington state begin to shrink.
Additionally, Barbara Boxer’s lead in California is all but gone.
On top of this, we already have tight-as-a-tick races in Illinois, Nevada, and West Virginia. We’ll probably see Wisconsin tighten soon, too.
My guess is that relatively little of this is actual movement toward one side or the other, but rather the consequence of an electorate finally getting engaged in the campaign. Polls give us an impression of how a political campaign is going, but it is not a complete picture because the electorate is not always engaged, and polls fail to capture that beyond the percentage of “undecided” voters. The problem is that lots of people who claim to be decided in the summer are actually undecided, or support one candidate or another in a very shallow way. As the campaign begins, there is “movement” in the numbers, but really that is a consequence of a disengaged electorate beginning to pay closer attention.
We saw something like this happen in the Democratic primary Senate battle in Pennsylvania in the Spring. Arlen Specter had a large lead, but it’s better to say he had a large “lead,” as it was based upon the shallow impressions of a disengaged electorate. As the electorate started to pay more attention, it “moved” toward Sestak. A similar process explains how Hillary Clinton could have a 25 point lead in June, 2007 but lose the Democratic nomination to Barack Obama in June, 2008.
Here in 2010, I think it is fair to say that the outsized leads in several of these states – Murray in Washington, Paul in Kentucky, Toomey in Pennsylvania – were bound to be whittled down as the television advertising hit its peak. That is probably what is happening now. As for Pennsylvania in particular, it is worth remembering that the state has historically had a Democratic tilt of 3-5 points. If this turns out to be an R+7 year, Toomey will have the advantage, but the race will still be closer than what it has appeared to have been all summer and through much of the fall. What’s more, a careful examination of that PPP poll indicates not only that it is predicting a more Democratic electorate than 2008, but also that 51% of likely voters disapprove of President Obama’s job performance. That remains a major problem for Sestak
2. Mailbag! Reader Matt writes in with a Senate related question:
This is a really good question. Let’s see if we can unpack it a little bit.
For starters, the Republicans will end up winning the Senate popular vote this year, probably by a wide margin. I count a whopping 18 seats that are safely or likely Republican this cycle, while just 7 seats are safely or likely Democratic. So, as a predictor of voter sentiment, the generic ballot is probably not too bad when it comes to the Senate. If anything, it is probably underestimating Republican popular vote strength.
The issue is really the translation of popular votes into Republican pickups. And here, the problem for the GOP is that, as the writer notes, the Republicans are “working in hostile territory.” President Obama’s median vote haul across the 50 states in 2008 was 51.15%, while his median vote in the 19 states Democrats are defending (and remember, we have to count New York twice here!) is 57.3. This suggests that, on average, the Democrats are defending D+6 states.
Put another way, the Republicans need to pick up 10 of these 19 Democratic seats for an outright majority in the upper chamber. The 10th most Republican state is Washington, which has not voted for a Republican presidential candidate since 1984. By my count, the Republican path to a Senate majority goes through at least four states the party has not won on a presidential level since the 1980s. Meanwhile, there are 19 Senate Democrats from states that George W. Bush won in 2004 that are not up for reelection this year.
I’m not sure if weak candidates are going to play a role anywhere outside of Delaware just yet, although if Michael Bennet in Colorado and Harry Reid in Nevada get much more than whatever President Obama’s job approval is among the final electorate, then the weak challenges will have likely made a difference. On the other hand, if it weren’t for particularly strong candidates in California and Washington (and, for that matter, a very weak Democrat in Illinois), a Senate takeover would not be possible.
Keep sending those questions in! [email protected].
