On Election Night 2010, there weren’t a whole lot of surprises. And given the scope of what happened, that in itself is surprising.
After all, the Republicans picked up more seats in the House than at any time since 1938; the GOP picked up 680 state legislative seats to set a modern record and also gained six new governorships.
So why was Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s victory in Nevada the only real shocker of the night? Because the public polling industry performed well and gave everybody a good idea of what to expect.
In some ways, the level setting went all the way back to April 2009 when a Rasmussen Reports poll showed Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania losing by 21 points in a Republican primary. Specter suddenly became a Democrat, but he couldn’t win that primary either.
Shortly after that, in July, President Obama’s ratings went negative in the Rasmussen Reports Presidential Approval Index on the eve of angry town hall meetings that brought the public anger into plain view.
At that time, Talking Points Memo contacted three Democratic activists who attacked the Presidential Approval Index as meaningless or worse. However, the article noted that Scott Rasmussen thought “that these numbers could be an important indicator in the lower-turnout midterm elections of 2010.”
The Republican victories in New Jersey and Virginia in the fall of 2009 confirmed the Job Approval polling as the health care debate dragged on and the recession continued.
By December 2009, a full 11 months before Election Day, a Democratic strategist concluded that if the Rasmussen Reports Generic Congressional Ballot data were accurate, Republicans would gain 62 seats in the House during the 2010 elections. The strategist noted, however, that some other polls suggested Democrats would retain a comfortable majority.
Adding further confirmation to the developing trend was January’s stunning special election to fill Sen. Ted Kennedy’s seat in the U.S. Senate. This was another moment where the polls helped prepare the public and should have given the Democrats a reason to expect the unexpected come November.
The Pew Center noted that Rasmussen Reports beat traditional media in covering Scott Brown’s upset win: “It was polling, not journalistic reporting, that caught the wave in the race to succeed Massachusetts Senator Edward M. Kennedy.”
All the way through the year, the polls kept providing a good look at what was coming in November. In Florida, Rasmussen polling showed Marco Rubio surpassing Charlie Crist early in the year, a move that eventually forced a three-way Senate race.
While Crist appeared competitive for a short period of time over the summer, by early fall the polls made it clear that Rubio would win with room to spare.
Early in 2010, Democrats anticipated possible takeovers of Republican seats in Ohio, Missouri and North Carolina. After Rand Paul won the Republican senatorial nomination in Kentucky, some Democrats thought they could take that seat as well. But by Labor Day, polls had shown that those expectations were not realistic.
Instead, the polls stunningly showed that an unknown businessman was performing very well against Russ Feingold in Wisconsin. That unknown businessman is now Sen.-elect Ron Johnson.
Another thing that became clear long before Election Day was the fact that the health care law finally passed by Congress in March had become a big drag on the Democratic majority. From the moment it was passed, Rasmussen Reports weekly polling has shown that a majority of voters want it repealed.
Additionally, polling showed the health care law was especially unpopular among senior citizens who use the health care system more than anyone else. Thus, it was not a big surprise to find that seniors preferred Republicans to Democrats by a 21-point margin in 2010. Just two years earlier, seniors preferred John McCain over Barack Obama, but only by eight percentage points.
Of course, as the polls showed more and more clearly what was coming in November, some who didn’t like the results kept trying to shoot the messenger and attack the pollsters, but by the time Election Day arrived, it was clear that the problem Democrats were facing had little to do with the polls and everything to do with the reality the pollsters were measuring.
While just about the entire evening of Nov. 2 went as predicted, there was the surprise in Nevada. Public polls showed Reid trailing by a few points when he in fact won rather handily.
This is the second election cycle in a row where the public polling dramatically understated support for the Democratic ticket in Nevada. A majority leader coming back from far behind would have attracted attention on any Election Night, but it was especially noteworthy on a night when everything else went as expected.
Polls won’t always foreshadow as well as they did in 2010. But, for this year, the polling industry had a good Election Night. Now, it’s on to 2012. Who knows what surprises await. For those of us surveying the field, let’s hope they’ll be few and far between.
Scott Rasmussen is founder of Rasmussen Reports, an electronic media polling company that tracks the political world, current events, consumer confidence, business topics and the president’s job approval ratings daily.
