Discussion for article #229309
I’m surprised. I would have thought that the presence of GOTP royalty like the Palins would have sewn up Alaska for the Republicans for the foreseeable future.
15 Likes
The margin of error puts this in the same range as the tied poll. I doubt he’s that far ahead, but it’s nice to see Sullivan’s lead has gone.
8 Likes
Outlier!
1 Like
The margin of error puts this in the same range as the tied poll.
The margin of error is 4.88%
The lead is 10%
Hellenthal is a Republican pollster.
3 Likes
Polls don’t really matter at this point. This race is essentially tied, as are the races in many states. Turnout is everything.
7 Likes
Although the talking heads known as our media have recently been BSing about this being another seat that the Dems are very vulnerable in, while of course also telling us how hard it is to poll in Alaska, and what a wonderful ground game Begich has.
Polling has now become big business, and there are so many polling entities out there, that after the 2012 election, I have come to realize it is a race for money, and basically a joke. Remember how right before the 2012 election, the talking heads were running all over the place, screaming about the Presidential race being a dead heat? Yeah, well Obama won by 5 points, and that is when I realized what a big business, money making scam polling is, not to mention a ratings scam for our corporate whore media.
13 Likes
That isn’t what margin of error means. It means that the pollster is 95.12% confident that as of the time of the poll, Begich was leading by close to 10 points.
It doesn’t mean the “real” answer is somewhere between 5.12% and 14.88%
6 Likes
Much as I would love to believe this poll, I’m very, very skeptical. There were scattered polls in 2008 and 2012 showing Obama implausibly close in Alaska… and they were wrong.
That doesn’t mean Begich can’t win. He’s shown surprising resilience in a very red state, and is reasonably popular. But a very tight race is the best we can realistically hope for now.
7 Likes
Imagine that, all of the hand wringing is bullshit. Let’s be real, the Republicans are going to win some and lose some and there will likely be a few surprises on both sides. That is just politics and not some new phenomena.
The thing that counts is that the, as crazy as they can be and not be institutionalized Republicans, are using up the last of their best dirty tricks. Voter suppression isn’t the fixall that they had hoped for and it hurts them really before, during and after the elections. The Citizen’s United sham that our wonderful Supreme Court allowed is a break even or is backfiring on them but it is flooding all markets with media money and Karl Rove loves it, so they’ve got that going for them?
The big picture looks awesome for us Democrats and it pretty much doesn’t even include the Republicans after this decade. Skewing can’t change that.
14 Likes
It would be nice if this poll was accurate, but it seems to be way out of line with what most other pollsters are showing. Again, I hope it is correct.
3 Likes
We will all find out in a few weeks when the final polling is conducted that Tuesday in November 
3 Likes
I am in agreement with that statement. There may be a surprise but nothing that wasn’t always a possibility.
3 Likes
An October 14 poll by Rasmussen Reports gave Sullivan a 3 point lead. What this and the Hellenthal poll show, is that Begich is still very much in the race, in spite of Alaska being a very Red state.
In 2012, Romney beat Obama 55 to 41 percent.
2 Likes
Clearly the poll was skewed by the Alaska Day Festival held during the week around 18 October in Sitka. Everyone in Alaska was celebrating the transfer of Alaska from Russia to the US and no one was answering their phones.
[And if you believe that one, I’ve got one to tell you about the World Series.]
19 Likes
Amen to that. Living in California where voting turnout is always low it doesn’t usually hurt us too bad because the Dems usually win even in low turnouts.
We have been inundated with No Prop 45 ads (multi-millions being spent by the insurance companies to defeat it, claiming it will make one politician in charge of coming between patients and their doctors and will raise costs) when in fact Prop 45 wants the insurance commissioner’s approval before the insurance carriers can raise rate and requires public hearing and disclosure and judicial review before they can.
I am amazed at even how many of my friends are clueless as to 45 or have even read their ballots. There are 5 very serious issues on the ballot and yet this lazy attitude really disgusts me.
8 Likes
You missed one. It is also a Republican tactic to try to drive the news agenda to report on Republicans surging, surfing a wave, whatever metaphor you want, with a view to making the impression become the reality.
I think this time that tactic has run into two problems. The first is that 2012 has left the reputation of polling as a whole significantly lower than it was. The second is that when your party is as viscerally hated by so many as the GOP currently is, seeing it leading in the polls gins up the opposition to pull out all the stops.
That is why I expect the actual result to be somewhere between about two to five points more Democratic than the current polling averages.
But I fear that that in turn will feed the GOP’s “voter fraud” meme. They will say that if the result is so far from the polls, that must mean the Dems have committed fraud. They won’t accept that it just means the polls are trash.
14 Likes
I don’t think that is right. I am not a statistician, so I am willing to be corrected on this, but in my job I talk to some fairly regularly. As I understand it, there are two factors here. The first is the margin of error. This says that the outcome is X, but given the margin of error, this actually means the answer is X +/- the MoE.
The second factor is the confidence interval. This says that given all the available information, the pollster is 95% confident, or whatever it might be, that X +/- the MoE is the correct answer to the question.
6 Likes
Exactly. For the GOP it is a double strategy, the first being to hope to make Dem voters feel it is a losing cause to waste their time voting, so they stay home on election day, and then of course if the Dems keep the Senate, all we will hear is about voter fraud, and how the Dems found a way to steal the election.
4 Likes