Discussion for article #229544
Another state in transition to Team Blue.
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The hard part is turning out people the pollsters deem “unlikely” voters. The hard part of the hard part is getting them to vote all the way down the ballot to the local and supposedly nonpartisan judicial races once you get them there, especially given that, among the many exciting innovations our new Imperial Kochtopus overlords brought us was the abolition of straight ticket balloting.
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There is no rational whatsoever for eliminating the straight ticket voting. Though I do not believe this is really their reason for getting rid of the extra early voting days. They are able to explain it in terms of lowering cost (except most people are volunteers). Straight ticket voting, however, there’s no lie that makes sense.
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In Michigan we still have straight ticket voting. We also have tons of Kochsucker ads here. I’m sure it’s a matter of time until we too lose the straight ticket option. I do know that repubs want to change the way districts count their votes for president so that it isn’t a winner take all. I notice a pattern here big time. Repubs know that they are losing supporters. Instead of coming up with ideas to attract new voters, they just want to game the system so they can stay in power.
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I’m sorry, but I can’t see why this is an important story (other than it being important enough for me to comment on it 
They’re telling us that approximately the same percentage of early voters have voted in this election. That the majority of voters who have voted early are non-black and non-Democratic. That based on the graphic it looks as though the rate of white early voters is increasing faster than blacks. NCSteve, could you unpack this a little further for us?
I have a feeling that there are going to a bunch of surprises on election night. Shocking surprises.
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Oh, dude, they weren’t even trying to pretend there was a rational reason for most of the stuff they crammed into their law. They talked about it as if the only thing it dealt with was requiring a photo id and whenever anyone pointed out any of the other crazy, extreme, blatantly partisan crap they’d loaded it up with, they’d spew out an ink cloud of Luntzified word salad build around the words “common sense reform” and swim away.
For example, two of their “common sense reforms” consisted of scrapping the public financing scheme for judicial elections and tweaking our “non-partisan” judicial ballots so that the first candidate on the ballot for a particular race would be the one of the same political party of the governor. Why? Because mrble blurf common sense reforms argle bargle glurp.
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What am I missing here? If I read the article correctly, African American votes are a smaller proportion than at this time in 2012, when Obama was on the ballot, but lost NC. How is it that a smaller AA percentage this year is good for Hagen, who has to do better than Obama in 2012. Please, please explain to me what I’ve missed.
I’m sure NCSteve has a better handle, but the way I read it was that they were outperforming 2010, which is probably the “likely voter” model being used by the polls. If the current polls are showing Hagan with a 49-48 lead for example (I made those numbers up), but weighting their sample to reflect 20% AA, when its 25% AA (and Hagan leads among AA 80-20),then all else held equal, Hagan is probably leading by 4 or 5 rather than 1.
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OK. Thanks. That helps, but doesn’t that assume that the “white votes” are no more Republican than they were in 2010? What if that isn’t true?
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Based on 2012 precedent, Dems will pull just about get enough senate seats to hold on to the senate. Dems pull in a squeaker again.
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That makes sense.
Then we’re screwed.
Voter ID laws the anti-solution to minority voting. It motivates them to vote every time!
Telling anyone that they can’t do something always motivates those individuals to do it.
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OK. Just wanted to make sure I understood the theory behind the math.
I think the real problem is that most polls know by now that they can’t use 2010 to weight their results demographically, but resist using 2012 as the baseline and further can’t accept, institutionally, the notion that microtargeted turnout efforts can make enough “unlikely” voters vote to cause their likely voter screens to make their results less, rather than more, accurate.
That’s exactly what happened in 2012, and it’s what happened in Colorado in 2010, but, so far, there’s no actual empirical evidence that it will work nationally, or even in each of the states with a close Senate race that the Democrats have dropped 60 million bucks doing that stuff in, in a midterm, so what’s a pollster to do?* What happened in Colorado may have been a one time thing, that worked there and then and because it caught the Republicans flat-footed. Have the Republicans caught up? Is it possible to find enough Republican “unlikely” voters and get them to the polls to make a difference even if they have? Who knows? It’s impossible to model.
And I think that’s why you see so much variation in the polls–no on really knows what to do, but no one can admit to any doubt about what they’re doing because it would both lose them business and cause all of them to face a huge existential crisis.
*My answer to that question, btw, is “in the face of all this uncertainty, don’t bury your RV numbers, even if it means you might end up revealing that your LV model is actually a data distortion field.”
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That’s a technical political science term, btw.
Reading through the comments, I see that they are achieving their hoped for agenda to keep voters confused, and hopefully too apathetic to vote, with the constant barrage of this poll and that poll and their bipolar results, along with their trying to compare the early turnout in this election to that of 2012, when it is comparing it to that of the election of 2010 that is more relevant, and in that case this shows it is up among blacks from 2010 which is a good thing.
Remember this, our media wins if the GOTP takes the Senate, both because our media is owned by a handful of corporate oligarchs, that donate a lot of money hoping to get the corporate loving GOTP back in power. I also believe that our media wants them to take the Senate, because they know good and well that will mean two years of ratings gold, because they know good and well what a total mess the GOTP will make of things if they do get the Senate back.
I do hope the polls are wrong, and that the Dems can manage to keep the Senate, but if they don’t, I am already pacifying myself, by the knowledge that if they do, with what I am hearing from the likes of McChinless and other big mouths of the stupid party, they are going to so screw themselves for 2016, by the evil plans that they are revealing they have planned.
According to Casey Hunt from MSNBC, who is on the ground in Colorado, she said that while the Republicans keep saying their ground game is better this time around, that when she talks to them, what she is hearing they are doing sounds the exact same as they did in 2012 for Romney.
She also said that the Repub rallies she has been to, one with Jeb Bush and another with Christie, the rallies are really small and pretty lackluster, but the Dem rallies she has attended has large crowds and a lot of enthusiasm. She also said that the Dems do have a robust ground game going on there. I don’t know if what she is reporting will be enough to prove the polls wrong, but as you said, that is what happened with Bennet, and can happen again.
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