Unskew the polls! Michigan Edition
By Neil Stevens on February 20, 2014
One thing Barack Obama has done very, very well for Democrats is turn out voters. Some Democrats have also learned winning models from his campaigns, including Terry McAuliffe in Virginia.
Michigan Democrats want to do the same, but so far the polls aren’t agreeing with them.
It’s been about nine months since any poll came out that showed Democrat Mark Schauer ahead of incumbent Republican Governor Rick Snyder. And in fact you have to go back even farther than that to find a poll not by Democrat-allied Public Policy Polling that showed Schauer ahead.
This suggests that over the last year, the entire polling community in Michigan has decided that the proper turnout model for 2014 right now does not favor Democrats in the way that Politico reports the Democrats are hoping.
This makes me laugh because throughout the 2012 campaign, it was Republicans who were claiming that the polling predicted turnout that didn’t make sense, though in fact it turned out that the polling predicted matched the kind of data-driven campaigning the President was doing.
The more Democrats claim that they’re going to drive huge off-year turnout, the more we’re going to see the 2014 version of Unskew the Polls, I’m expecting.