Poll Analysis and Election Projection
Once again, the polls were pretty close. Mitt Romney’s ground game carried him to overperform. Gingrich underperformed. A 10 point advantage became 14, and Romney approached an absolute majority closer than I imagined he could.
Romney sweeps Florida’s at-large delegates and takes a 66-25 lead among pledged delegates.
Just a week ago, the big story from Gallup was that the Republicans had hit an all-time high lead in their poll. I covered it despite questioning the poll in the past. Everyone covered it.
But now, suddenly, in the Gallup poll the race is even? How can that be, and what does it mean?
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.”
I’m definitely a latecomer to following the Delaware Senate primary between Republicans Mike Castle and Christine O’Donnell, but now that I’m aware of it, it’s striking to me just how differently the two candidates perform in the new Rasmussen poll featuring each candidate against Democrat Chris Coons.
My plan had been to push out projections every Monday until election day but Labor Day brought out the laziness in me, so we do this week’s on Tuesday. Last time, my third projection showed the second straight gradual gain for Republicans. Let’s see if the trend continues.
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.
New Hampshire apparently tries to hard in Presidential years to have its primaries first, that it tires and has to have its Senate primaries last. So we’re still on primary watch for that state, and it looks like the Republican race has shifted again.
Kelly Ayotte still leads the primary race to decide Democrat Paul Hodes’s opponent, but it appears the race for second is wide open now.
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.
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