Unlikely Voter

This is a new feature I’m going to start here at Unlikely Voter. When I see a few polls that aren’t really a whole post in themselves, I’ll throw a post out wrapping them all up into one post.

One of the first posts I ever made at UnlikelyVoter charted Marco Rubio’s steady rise against Charlie Crist in his Senate primary.

Matt Bevin is not following that pattern against Mitch McConnell.

The last SurveyUSA poll of the Kentucky Senate race showed Republican Randal Paul running away with it from Democrat Jack Conway. However the new one tells a completely different story in its top line.

When two polls by the same firm of the same race differ by that much, there has to be a story behind the story. Fortunately SurveyUSA’s detailed public reports make it easy to dig in and find what that story is.

The last time Public Policy Polling hit the Kentucky Senate race, Republican Randal Paul had squandered a huge lead. Democrat Jack Conway had pulled within 7 in the Rasmussen poll back at the end of June, and he was even tied in the PPP poll of Registered Voters.

PPP (this time for Daily Kos) is polling Likely Voters now, and it’s not good news for Conway.

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.

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.

I try my best to avoid various forms of bias in my polling analysis on this site, but some polls just look so ridiculous to me that I throw out any fears of confirmation bias and just go in with the plan of tearing the poll apart.

This Braun Research poll for cn|2 of the Kentucky Senate race is one of those polls.

In an open and credited aping of the Greenberg Quinlan Rosner House battleground polls, Public Opinion Strategies has conducted a massive Senate battleground poll.

Politico has for us the summary and 150 pages of gory, numerical details. I’m going to see what sense I can make of it.

Randal Paul never has fully recovered from his initial unforced errors after winning the primary. Which is why Rasmussen Reports, which once showed him up 25 points, has him still lingering under 50 now, though still leading.

Jim Geraghty points out a possible issue with PPP’s polling in Kentucky: PPP has Democrats taking a greater share of the 2010 electorate than the exit polls gave them in 2008.

That strikes me as most unlikely. Democrats were remarkably motivated in 2008, but it is Republicans who enjoy that status today. So I’m inclined to discount PPP’s result of a tie in Kentucky.

With the help of the Real Clear Politics, here are the last few polls of the Kentucky Senate race. PPP: Randal Paul +1. RR: Paul +25. SUSA: Paul +6. RR: Paul +8, Paul +7. And now we have PPP: Tie.

Why is PPP running so much further toward Jack Conway than the other two pollsters?

I need to make more direct links to Real Clear Politics. I rely on them heavily for their poll aggregation. I just load up the Recent Polls page and I get post ideas all the time.

So here’s a direct link: RCP points out that in the latest Rasmussen poll of the Kentucky Senate Race, there really isn’t any change. The race is stable, with Randal Paul on top.

Some have expected Republican Randal Paul to fall in the polls against Democrat Jack Conway since accusations emerged that he would have opposed the original Civil Rights Act. SurveyUSA’s poll for the Louisville Courier-Journal and WHAS seems to confirm that expectation.