Coming up on thirty days out from the mid-term, what does the generic ballot tell us? Here’s our latest trend chart.
(Click the TPM logo to see full sized chart.)
We’ve had a slew of new polls since last we looked. And they vary from a 9 point GOP advantage to a 4 point Dem advantage. If you look a bit deeper into the particulars though, there’s a surprising convergence.
First, as we’ve discussed before, our default chart does not include ‘Internet polls’ like Zogby’s, Harris’s etc. If you include those, it looks like this …
What’s interesting, as I said, is that the numbers appear to be coming into a pretty striking convergence. If you toss out the CNN and Harris polls, which are outliers on each side, you’ve got Zogby, Gallup, NBC/WSJ, Rasmussen and GWU. The margins are -5D, -0D, -3D, -6D and -4D. But the Gallup poll which has a tie is registered voters, not likely voters. And, when NBC/WSJ include all registered voters they got a tie too. When they pulled down to only likelies they got a 3 point GOP margin. Put that all together and you have pollsters actually getting very similar numbers. Five pollsters in a really tight range.
Stepping back, Dems have made real progress over the last week to ten days. But they’re still looking at a 3+ deficit among likely voters. And that’s not good.
[ed.note: Get the very latest poll data of every congressional and gubernatorial race in the country at TPMPolltracker. The latest numbers, race averages, interactive graphs and more.]
