Monday, January 18, 2010

What about 60 seats?

THE ABSURD TIMES



1.18.2010

The Coakley-Brown Intangibles

I don't doubt or have anything to add to Nate's various polling analyses, but as he noted to me by email, there remains a very real chance of non-response bias in these polls. Still, the swirl of last-minute reports about this or that external or internal poll result confirms that we can be certain tomorrow's results will not be a typical Democratic blowout in Massachusetts.

So what will win or lose this tight race for either Martha Coakley or Republican Scott Brown?

A lot of the chatter surrounds intangibles. And on balance, most of the intangibles in the contest seem to point to a Brown victory:
*Coakley's fumbles. She's made two--not one, but two--Red Sox-related gaffes. Though most people who get their political information from Curt Schilling were probably not going to vote for Coakley anyway, calling Schilling a Yankees fan is beyond dumb. And in a short-sprint, low-information race, such moments are ideal fodder for "out-of-touch" narratives. Knowing who the heck Curt Schilling is won't lower healthcare premiums or pay for grandma's medication, but geez. One Sox gaffe ought to be enough to shut up a candidate on the subject. (Unless I missed something, John Kerry didn't compound his "Manny Ortiz" blunder in 2004.) But a second gaffe?
*Brimming conservative confidence. Conservatives are also chirping about big buzz at Brown rallies. And however much liberal nerves are soothed by President Obama's last-minute visit to the state, his inability to draw crowds like those he did 2008 is causing further crowing.

*The combination of anti-incumbent sentiment and anti-Democratic sentiment. Coakley is not literally an incumbent, of course. But as a stand-in for Teddy Kennedy she actually has it worse than an incumbent because at least endangered incumbents have deep connections to voters, a track record of porkbarreling and constituent service to point to, and related brand name advantages.

*A chops-licking opportunity. As if all the above were not enough to stoke conservative excitement, taking Kennedy's seat at a moment when the healthcare package is still not passed would for Republicans be like finding both a bike and a pony under the Xmas tree. The fact that voting is taking place in a mid-January special election in an midterm election season helps, too. This is a perfect storm for Massachusetts Republicans.
So...stick a fork in Coakley, she's done--right? Not so fast.

First of all, any chance Brown had of sneaking up on her is now gone. The closeness of the race is generating high passions--cautious excitement on the right, worry bordering on panic on the left. But in Massachusetts you don't want high passion and level of attention on both sides if you're a Republican; you want an asymmetrical level of passion favoring your side. You want to catch the Democrats napping all the way through to Election Day. That almost happened. But Coakley and state Dems--especially the unions--and the White House all awoke before it was over. We'll see if they rose from their collective slumber too late.

Second, intangibles make for good copy but campaign media narratives tell an incomplete tale. Whatever unions and the Democratic machine are doing, and whether it will be enough or not, their actions are simply less newsworthy than a Sox-Yankees comment, or a Schilling blog post, or whatever Scott Brown did or said at a Tea Party rally.

Third, we'll finally get a certifiable test of whether the Obama political machine has applicability for Democrats other than himself. As Mother Jones' Nick Baumann reports, the White House has gone all in with the Organizing for America list Obama built in 2008.

All of which is not to say Coakley will pull this out. I think it would be crazy to make a wager either way. There are too many unknowns. At this point, a Coakley victory would be the "surprise" outcome, which shows how much the tables have turned in the Bay State. But it would not be that surprising. Intangibles matter but they aren't everything.

Contract Post

Obama Approval Under 50 Percent Among Massachusetts Likely Voters?

The National Review's Jim Gergahty tweets: "Can Obama really save Coakley if PPP puts his approval/disapproval split at 44/43?"

If the electorate which turns out tomorrow is this indifferent about Obama, I have little doubt that Coakley is headed for defeat. But I think we have to place into context just how lopsided turnout would be if indeed we see an electorate that is split 44/43 on Obama. Here are some of the relevant numbers, both in Massachusetts and nationally.

There's More...

A Hung Parliament? (From the Gallows, Perhaps?)

Coming off three straight electoral victories in 1997, 2001 & 2005 under the leadership of Tony Blair, the governing Labour party in the U.K. is in real trouble. Behind in the polls by about 9-10 points and limping along with their smallest majority since they took power of the House of Commons in the 1997 landslide, Prime Minister Gordon Brown has just a few months to engineer a radical turnaround. Indeed, some observers have remarked that the real question is not whether Labour will win (they won't, many say) but instead how long they will be out of power.

There's More...

Trendspotting in Massachusetts

Charles Franklin has a typically articulate analysis up at Pollster.com which comes to a somewhat different conclusion than mine about the state of play in Massachusetts. His analysis works by lumping polls together into different bundles (e.g. "non-partisan", "Republican + non-partisan") and producing the following graph:



This certainly looks persuasive. But I'm not sure if it's as robust as it appears. What happens, for instance, if instead of bundling together different types of polls, we instead let each poll speak for itself?

There's More...

Massachusetts Model Mayhem

Here is what my "traditional" Senate model now says, updated with new polling from PPP and the potentially dubious firm known as CrossTarget.

Scenario 1:


Under its original assumptions, the model now projects a very slight Brown edge, 49.3-48.7, which maps to a 55 percent chance of winning. Earlier today, it had given Coakley a 57 percent chance of winning. However, because the odds are under 60 percent, we still call this race a "toss-up" per our nomenclature, as we did before.

But what if we made different assumptions?

There's More...

65 Comments...

No comments: