Martha Coakley Will Win Tomorrow – According to Martha Coakley’s Internal Polls

If  this website is to be believed Martha Coakley is going to defy every recent poll I have seen and win the race tomorrow to replace Ted Kennedy.  The blogger tells us that “A Coakley campaign source insists the latest internal polling shows attacks on Brown as a ‘shill for Wall Street’ are resonating and pushing up Brown’s negatives, which perhaps explains the heavy populist emphasis of the Obama spot.  Still, the source concedes that the race is a toss up: The internals say she leads 48-46.”

So there you have it.  Coakley’s own internal poll has her up by 2%.  Obama’s appearance will stem the movement toward Brown, and instead Coakley will pull this out.

Meanwhile, every other public poll I have seen has Brown winning this race.  Charles Franklin puts it this way: “Republican Scott Brown holds a lead in all 18 alternative models of the Massachusetts Senate race polls, now including all polls released through 6:00 p.m. Monday. Our standard trend estimate puts the race at a 6.2 point Brown lead over Democrat Martha Coakley. The less sensitive alternative linear model puts the Brown lead at 7.3 points. Across all models, Brown leads by between 1.0 and 8.9 points. Three quarters of the estimates have Brown ahead by 4 points or more.”   Graphically, what Franklin is saying is this:

In other words, no matter how you slice the polling data, Brown wins this.

Here’s where you have to decide: heart or mind?  Do you let your emotions color your judgment, or do you let the evidence decide? Again and again during the 2008 presidential election I saw very smart people – many of them colleagues of mine – let their emotions rule their judgment regarding what was happening in that campaign. They became invested in a candidate – or against a candidate (Sarah Palin anyone?) – and that investment shaped their interpretation of the polling and voting evidence.  McCain supporters thought he might be able to pull the election out.  Obama supporters were convinced he had won a political mandate that meant a transformation in the way American politics would operate at the national level.  I’m seeing the same thing today, in sites like Nate Silver’s, where people are spinning extraordinary scenarios in which Coakley wins this race.  To believe that she wins, however, means ignoring a growing body of polling results that say Brown is poised to pull off the biggest political upset in recent memory.

And yet.  Call me an emotional person, or maybe it’s because I spent most of my life in Massachusetts, but I’m still having trouble accepting that Brown is going to pull this off – that a Republican is going to replace Ted Kennedy as a Senator from Massachusetts.    But how does Coakley prevent that from happening?   There is only one way in which these polling results are wrong, and that is because this is a special election – one in which conventional turnout models are wrong.  In other words, pollsters’ estimates of how many will vote, and in what proportions, are so far off that they are not accurately forecasting the results.  This is precisely what happened in the most recent special election in NY’s 23^rd congressional district.  Jack would have us believe that possibility suggests our forecasts are no different than punditry.  I disagree.  Recognizing the uniqueness of a particular event is not punditry – it’s a warning that existing models of behavior don’t necessarily apply. Remember: The NY election had a unique twist: three candidates, with the Republican throwing her support behind the Democrat at the last minute.

The issue becomes: is there reason to believe that we should discount the polling data when trying to assess the likely outcome of the Massachusetts Senate race?  Is it that much of an unusual event?

Everything I know about Massachusetts, dating back to my time as a reporter for a local newspaper there, tells me Brown can’t win this.  The polling evidence says otherwise.

I’ve made a point of stressing that this blog is different from other blogs.  I follow the evidence.  It says, as of tonight, that Brown is poised to win this race.

Tomorrow I’ll explain why I think he will do so.