Unlikely Voter

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.

Some Senate seats I’ll worry about all the way to November, but today when I looked at the list of new polls out, I got a flood of races I’m pretty comfortable calling for the Republican, barring any new news of course.

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.

It’s been pretty rough for Sharron Angle since she won the Republican nomination for Senate in Nevada. Republican “allies” and opposing Democrats both have been attacking her, with each repeating the other’s attacks and magnifying them.

So Harry Reid made what I thought was a surprising comeback to take a small lead, after spending months hovering around 40. But Rasmussen’s latest says that the attacks may have hit the point of diminishing returns.

Both Bill McCollum and Kendrick Meek have struck back against their respective challengers Rick Scott and Jeff Greene. Meek has campaigned hard with Bill Clinton, while McCollum has done different things depending on whom you ask.

Regardless though, Quinnipiac shows both candidates on top as the Florida primary nears.

Good afternoon. My life gets much easier when polls agree, and that’s the state of the race for the Senate in Pennsylvania. We have two polls out directly comparing Republican Pat Toomey and Democrat Joe Sestak, as well as a poll on the Governor’s race.

All three favor Pat Toomey by a healthy margin.

PPP has delivered a poll on the Missouri Senate race for Daily Kos, and I’m seeing genuine anger at the results, which are now filtered for those likely to vote in November.

As Kos says, “So what’s going on? Our old friend, the intensity gap.”

I theorized before that Pat Quinn would drag down Alexi Giannoulias in Illinois, with a rout for Governor having reverse coattails for Senate, and now Public Policy Polling seems to show the effects I predicted.

A bad candidate for governor in a negative wave year is a terrible situation for a party to have, but that’s the Democrats in Illinois today.

According to Rasmussen’s latest, Rob Portman is holding a steady level of support in the Ohio Senate race. However the surge of support that Lee Fisher took after his primary win seems to be receding, which leaves Portman alone on top with a clear lead.

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.

It’s now been nearly two months since I made a projection of the US Senate elections. Since then we’ve had a number of primaries, television ads, polls, and other developments, so let’s see where we stand now.

SurveyUSA polled the California statewide races for San Francisco’s KPIX, a television station for one of the most safe cities in the state for Democrats. This is Nancy Pelosi’s own district here. Any bias introduced into this poll won’t be from the right.

So it’s notable when this poll shows Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman ahead of Barbara Boxer and Jerry Brown.