Unlikely Voter

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In an open and credited aping of the Greenberg Quinlan Rosner House battleground polls, Public Opinion Strategies has conducted a massive Senate battleground poll.

Politico has for us the summary and 150 pages of gory, numerical details. I’m going to see what sense I can make of it.

Right off the bat, we lose out on the Swingometer when making the transition from House to Senate, unfortunately. I skipped the Senate when building the Swingometers because there are so few races that I feel I can cover them individually.

So when I look at the list of states in the poll (FL, KY, MO, NH, OH + AR, CO, DE, IL, IN, NV, PA, and WA) I think the results are going to be a bit misleading. I think that some of those states – specifically, AR, DE, and IN – are hardly battlegrounds in that they’re effectively lost to the Democrats already. So off the top, there’s going to be a Republican skew here in my estimation.

But the poll still shows independents to break for Republicans 47-25. The addition of a few marginal states should not be enough to create a 22 point margin, which is even bigger than that in practice because all of the remaining 28% of independents aren’t going to be voting third party, most instead will probably break R/D the way the rest do. Independents are favoring Republicans.

Even worse for Democrats, if we look specifically at voters expressing a Very High likelihood of voting, the overall split is 60 R-29 D, a rout. Include those who slightly less likely to vote than that, and it only drops to 54-35. Democrats are depressed.

Combine those two factors, and it just can’t be a good year for Democrats in the most competitive Senate seats. My last projection still showed control of the chamber likely to remain with the Democrats, but their majority is set to be reduced drastically.