Unlikely Voter

I said twice before that Christine O’Donnell’s big challenge in the Delaware Republican primary for Senate was that she needed to give the voters a reason to vote for her over the popular Mike Castle. For the whole primary season, she’d failed at that.

Judging by the new PPP poll, she’s very recently had great success. She leads.

Normally when I’m skeptical of a poll it’s because it’s from a firm I don’t trust or because I don’t think its methodology makes it predictive of the actual election.

But here we have Rasmussen Reports polling likely voters, and it’s by far the best poll I’ve seen for Republican Richard Burr in the North Carolina Senate race against Democrat Elaine Marshall.

Opinion Research polled California, Florida, and Kentucky for CNN and Time. The results seem off from those of other recent polls. Let’s find out why.

Yes, it’s the tiniest of all possible leads, but Republican Carly Fiorina has taken another polling lead over Democrat Barbara Boxer. Up until now we’ve had a discrepancy in the polling, in which SurveyUSA had Fiorina ahead but everyone else had Boxer ahead. I wondered how long that gap would last.

Apparently the answer was “one week.”

As I hinted yesterday, it is now time to update my House projection. My last comprehensive review gave Republicans 52 seats over 2008, but let’s see how far the Swingometer needles move this time, as even I have been surprised by how far some of these new Generic Ballots have shifted toward Republicans.

I didn’t know if Real Clear Politics would give me any new polls to discuss on Labor Day, but we actually have two interesting ones today: two new generic ballots to feed into the Swingometer, holding us over to my next big Generic Ballot roundup.

SurveyUSA is no fly-by-night operation in polling. They’ve been around a while, they have a reputation, and a great many newspapers seem use them to poll local House races.

So we can’t dismiss their continuing series of polls which look very good for Republicans, including this new Kentucky Senate poll for the Louisville Courier-Journal with Republican Randal Paul seeming to overwhelm Democrat Jack Conway.

We’re seeing a real discrepancy in the California Senate polling. SurveyUSA’s last two results were Republican Carly Fiorina ahead 5 and and now 2, while Rasmussen Reports has had Democrat Barbara Boxer up 5.

When the first major post-primary poll came out for the Washington Senate race, some questioned whether it was skewed toward Republican Dino Rossi over Democrat Patty Murray, or if it was simply an outlier.

But now we have confirmation that Rossi does appear to have a lead at this point, though perhaps not as large as SurveyUSA showed.

All the talk in your typical Senate analysis this year has assumed Republican Mike Castle will beat Democrat Chris Coons in the Delaware Senate race, but the fact is there’s still a GOP primary in progress.

It’s forgivable to forget about that primary when polling of the primary is scarce, and PPP and Rasmussen hold Coons under 40, but let’s extrapolate from the PPP poll to the primary.

It seems like most of the third party and independent spoilers this year are harming Democrats, but the Constitution Party’s Tom Tancredo is clearly hurting Republican Dan Maes in the Colorado Governor’s race, currently throwing the lead to Democrat John Hickenlooper.

But two new polls on that race, from Magellan Strategies via Real Clear Politics and Rasmussen Reports are so different that I think we need to see why that is.

As we approach election day I will be updating my Senate projection more frequently. So while I went two months before pushing out my last update, this time I’ve only gone slightly over two weeks.

There was a time when I thought about Nikki Haley’s campaign for governor every day. I’d scramble to find whatever polling I could get my hands on and read the news to try to explain any trends I might be seeing in the polls.

Now, though, the South Carolina Governor’s race joins that of Republican Brian Sandoval’s in Nevada as non-competitive barring a major event (or for Haley, another dirty trick).