Day three of our 2014 election countdown. As I said yesterday, if you want to be alerted the moment a poll is released in a race you’re following, download our PollTracker Mobile app (available on iOS and Android.)
The last twenty four hours have seen a raft of polls showing a strong position for Republican senate candidates almost across the board.
They’re from CNN/ORC and Fox News. The latter is subject to merited suspicion for obvious reasons. Fox seems if even anything more GOP tilted than in previous cycles. CNN/ORC has a strong reputation in general but they’ve also been had results that are generally to Republican candidates this year – perhaps because of particularly tight likely voter screens and generally not sampling third party candidates who in many races are drawing non-trivial amounts of support.
You can see all the CNN/Orc numbers here and the Fox numbers here.
The question really comes to full force in both pollsters’ reads of the Kansas Senate race. After a series of very bad polls for Roberts, CNN shows Roberts +1 and Fox +5. That’s surprising but a move like that is far from wholly unexpected. Kansas basically never elects Democrats. And Orman – both sides seem to agree – is a de facto Dem. Roberts’ campaign is entirely premised on making that argument. And it’s not a bad argument if you’re a Republican partisan. So maybe it’s catching hold.
The problem is that both polls also show a dramatic move for embattled Kansas Governor Sam Brownback. These two races have very different internal dynamics. Seeing both bounce back dramatically at the same time in these two polls really suggests that this flip may be tied to how the polls were conducted rather than an actual shift in the races. Roberts regaining his footing is not surprising; Brownback doing so just as Roberts does is very surprising.
As any poll watcher will tell you, be very cautious about coming up with reasons why some polls don’t count, especially ones you don’t like. But sometimes, some polls really are just off. Put the last twenty four hours down as a real boost for the GOP – unless of course Fox and CNN/ORC are outliers, in which case it’s not.
