I wanted to step back a few paces and take stock of where we are two weeks out from election day. It seems to me we’re seeing two basic trends. On the one hand, the generic congressional ballot, which had bobbled back and forth over recent months and seemed to be trending back toward the Dems, has moved decisively back in the Republican direction.
The congressional generic ballot is commonly seen as a good broad measure of the trend going into a congressional election. And it’s painting a pretty bleak picture for the Dems. At the same time, we’re seeing a decent amount of evidence for individual races where the Democrats seem to be outperforming, sometimes substantially outperforming those numbers. To put it another way, voters are liking the generic Republicans a lot better than the real ones they’re seeing on the ballot.
To put this in a proper perspective, an 8.7 point spread in favor of the GOP is so bad for the Dems that they can significantly outperform it and still get totally clobbered. So it’s important to put this in the proper perspective. But where something really does seem to be happening is on the Senate side.
In particular, Senate races that had looked basically done — specifically Pennsylvania and Kentucky — now seem legitimately back in contention. Other races, which had been basically written off, are tightening, though a certain amount of that is simply to be expected. But in PA and Kentucky, it looks like more than that. On top of that you have a poll out yesterday that shows Russ Feingold within 2 points of Ron Johnson. That’s a single poll, which seems way out of whack with all the others. So I’d advise extreme caution on reading too much into it. We’ll have to see what the next poll says, especially if it’s a pollster who’s already polled the race, thus allowing some apples to apples comparison. But maybe something’s trending in Feingold’s favor.
While this is happening, you’ve got a series of races that seemed in doubt for the Dems but then seemed to solidify in his favor. But some of them are tightening too. Here I’m thinking CA and Washington state. Then you’ve got Nevada, where at least for the moment Sharron Angle has moved back into a very narrow lead.
On balance, it looks like the broad measures are looking really bad for the Democrats. But when you look below the toplines, there are a lot of Dems outperforming the broad measures and enough data that doesn’t fit neatly with doomsday narrative to give Dems some hope they can significantly reduce the damage.
On the Senate side, it really looks to me like the Dems might be making a significant move.
