Unlikely Voter

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.

Tired of Florida yet? Too bad! Just about every public pollster is hitting the state comprehensively, so like a hanging chad this race will stick around at least until next week. And after Quinnipiac yesterday went contrarian on the primaries, today the firm goes contrarian on the general.

Just as I make my last post talking about a trend in the Florida Senate polling, Ipsos’ new poll for the St. Petersburg Times shows the opposite result.

Some may have questioned why, in my new Senate projection, I had Florida at a 55% chance to win for Republican Marco Rubio, when much of the polling has shown newly minted independent Charlie Crist with tiny leads.

It’s because I saw this new poll from Mason Dixon which not only covered the primary the Democrats are holding, but the consequences of that primary on the general election.

The last we looked in at Florida, the primaries seemed to be settling down. The two key races with remaining primaries, two Republicans running for Governor and two Democrats running for Senate, seemed to be showing clear frontrunners.

Well now a pair of polls have come out checking the general election matchups, but in those I’m seeing no clarity, but just a lot of noise and some confusing, close, three-way races.

Florida is a large and aggressively contested state. It, of all states, demands the clarity of traditional horserace polling. We have been denied that opportunity yet, though, because the Republicans still need a candidate for Governor and the Democrats still need a candidate for Senate.

Quinnpiac’s poll suggests we may get answers soon, as late entering political novices Rick Scott and Jeff Greene take leads, showing clear daylight between the candidates in each primary.

We have a pair of polls to look at updating us on the Florida Senate race, a general election carpet bomb from Rasmussen, and a peek at the race between the Democrats in the primary from PPP.

Unfortunately, what we don’t have is any clarity.

For a while the polling of the Florida Senate race had many people thinking that Charlie Crist, newly minted Independent, was running away with it.

I disagreed and assumed his bump in the polls was driven by heavy coverage of his party switch and of his oil spill inspections. Rasmussen’s latest just might bear that out as Marco Rubio takes a fresh lead.

Charlie Crist gave up the opportunity to run for re-election as Florida Governor to run for Senate, but instead got run out of the Republican primary and has since left the party entirely. I wonder what might have been had he just run for Governor instead.

Instead though, Republicans Bill McCollum and Rick Scott are fighting to challenge Democrat Alex Sink in November. Rasmussen polled these matchups.

In my first featured post at Unlikely Voter I illustrated how Marco Rubio went from being far, far behind Charlie Crist in the Republican Primary for the Florida Senate vacancy, to being the overwhelming favorite in the race.

Some wonder if Crist is taking this to heart and weighing and Independent run. Quinnipiac polled that scenario.

Here are a few polls that came out from later Friday to today that I don’t think deserve a full work-up, but are worth mentioning at least.

I wanted to see how my single-poll model looks when I apply it to the history of a race, and selected the Florida Republican Senate primary between former Speaker Marco Rubio and Governor Charlie Crist.