Unlikely Voter

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Good evening. We’re getting so very close to the end here, I may start running these more than once a week to see where they go. It depends on the interest level I see in that.

Last week it was Bloomberg filling in for Newsweek as the odd poll out, but now the original thing is here: Newsweek is back. We’ll see how far down it drags the overall average Republican gain.

As usual, to run my projection I take the recent generic ballot polls from Real Clear Politics, subtract out the undecideds and third party votes to get a pure two party vote, then compare that with the two party vote of 2008.

From there, I take a weighted average of the swing from 2008 to now in each poll, with Likely Voter polls counting double the weight of Registered Voter polls. That average is then run through the Swingometer to get a projected House composition.

Two party splits
Poll	Filter	D	R	Swing
2008	Actual	56	44	–
Rasmussen 10/24	LV	45	55	R+22
Gallup Low 10/24	LV	43	57	R+26
Gallup High 10/24	LV	45	55	R+22
Newsweek 10/21	LV	52	48	R+8
Politico/GWU/BG 10/20	LV	47	52	R+16
Pew 10/18	LV	44	56	R+24
AP/GfK 10/18	LV	46	54	R+20
Fox 10/13	LV	45	55	R+22

Every poll but the Politico/GWU poll and the Newsweek poll falls in the band of 20-26 point swing. And again, Newsweek is predicting Democrats to be more popular than Republicans this year. Odd.

But if we take the mean of all these Likely Voter poll swings, we gt a 20.0 swing. Giving that figure to Swingometer returns a 57 seat Republican gain over 2008, and a 235 R-200 D House majority. Oddly, the same as last week.

The Newsweek poll, I don’t even know where to begin with it. It’s not even close to the other polls. It’s off on its own in la-la land. If they’re right then good for them, but if they’re wrong then they’re thoroughly discredited going forward. Results this far off, if they’re wrong, leave me with no way to stand up and argue against the proposition that they are rigged for propaganda purposes. Newsweek just leaves me no leg to stand on.