Category Archives: Polling

I’m working on a longer post that tries to get a handle on what we might expect for turnout tomorrow and who that might help, but in the meantime one more poll came in so I thought I’d send it along.

At first glance, it looks like good news for Martha Coakley. The poll, which was sponsored by the Daily Kos, has her in a dead heat with Brown at 48%-48%.   That’s the good news.  The bad news is that the same pollster had Coakley up 49%-41% one week ago, so it is actually consistent with the trend toward Brown noted in my previous blog.  Moreover, this uses live interviewers which may – may – mask voter sentiment for Brown. Ideally, given the house effects of this particular polling outfit, Coakley supporters really wanted to see movement in the other direction.

To anticipate my next post, both Orion and Alex wonder whether Coakley is going to benefit by the apparent nationalizing of this race, since it will send a wakeup call to Democrats that this long-time Kennedy seat is in danger of going red.  One week ago I would have agreed with them that lower turnout favors Brown.  Now, as I begin to gauge the depth of anger among independents, I’m not so sure.  I hope to develop this point later this afternoon.

Meanwhile, news narratives are suggesting dueling frames for the Obama visit, with some accounts focusing on the strong turnout for his speech, and others contrasting it with the turnout for Brown’s counter rally headlined by – you guessed it – Curt Schilling.   Crowd estimates are notoriously unreliable, so I’m not even going to begin to parse this debate.  But it is a reminder that this late in the day, the media airwaves are saturated with ads, claims and counterclaims, which makes it difficult for any single event or message to dominate.  It really is going to come down to turnout.

More in a bit.

Addendum: ARG just in with their final poll: Brown 52% Coakley 45%.

Is Brown pulling away?  There’s conflicting evidence in that regard.  First, a one-day automated poll conducted by the Merriman River Group (MRG) on Friday shows Brown leading Coakley by 50.8% – 41.2%, the second poll in the last four days to show Brown with almost a double-digit lead. Again, however, it is by a less well known polling firm and the cross tabs are not available for me to review.  They do provide basic demographic evidence regarding the polling sample, and nothing stands out as obviously out of line with other polls, except for a slightly higher proportion of women – 59% – than I have seen in other polls.  Otherwise the partisan breakdown seems pretty consistent with what I’ve been seeing elsewhere.  The big unknown, of course, is what their voter screen kicked out of the sample.

The poll finds that Coakley’s support among women continues to slip; she and Brown now split the women’s vote 46%-46%.  The other interesting finding is that Brown’s supporters are mostly concerned about the economy, particularly jobs and taxes, while Coakley’s are focused on health care.  Consistent with earlier polls, the endorsement of Coakley by Kennedy’s widow hasn’t helped, and may have hurt, her campaign, with 27% saying it made them less likely to vote for Coakley, while only 18% said it made them more likely to vote for her.

This poll has a slightly higher percentage of undecided voters – about 6% – than other recent polls, and they are equally divided on whether health care or the economy is the most important issue.

The poll reinforces a point I made earlier, but which bears repeating:  Brown tends to do better in polling done through automated means as opposed to live interviews.  Some media outlets, such as the Boston Globe, have hinted that automated polls are less accurate. Actually, there’s no evidence that I know of supporting that assertion.  Indeed, an argument can be made – and I’ve made it in the context of this race – that automated polling may actually give a better preview of Tuesday’s outcome if people find it socially desirable to say they are supporting a Democrat to replace Kennedy, when in fact they are secretly planning on voting for Brown.  They are more likely to admit to supporting Brown if it involves pressing a number on a telephone pad than if it requires talking to a live interviewer.  If I get a chance, I’ll run the polling data to see just how much better Brown is doing on automated polls.

But that doesn’t mean this particular poll is accurate.  While it’s not impossible that Brown has netted 5% in the last 48 hours, I would feel more confident about this if PPP, which is releasing their two-day poll tonight, comes up with the same results.   An early tease by PPP’s polling director last night, however, suggests that the difference between the two candidates remains within PPP’s margin of error, indicating that the race remains essentially tied.  We should know in a few hours what PPP has found and that will give us a better perspective on this one-day poll as well.  For now, however, I remain skeptical that Brown has in fact opened up an almost 10% lead, as this poll suggests.

Note that all this polling is taking place before the Schilling gaffe, and even the PPP poll will not capture the effects of the Obama visit nor, I don’t think, the recent Coakley rape flier.

I’ll be on later when the PPP poll comes out. To whet your appetite, here are some other teases from last night’s PPP blog:

“-The electorate is becoming more Democratic. Last weekend we found it at Obama +16 and now we see it at Obama +20. So all the efforts to get the party base more engaged in the election are paying off.

-Balancing that out to some extent though is that we’re now seeing Brown win about 19% of the Obama vote, in comparison to 15% on our poll last week.

-Both candidates have seen a pretty large increase in their negatives over the last week, reflecting the increasingly nasty nature of the campaign.

-Even though the race is too close to call overall, 58% of voters think Brown has made a strong case for why he should be elected while only 41% say the same of Coakley. That speaks to voter perceptions that Brown has run the superior campaign and again you have to wonder how different things might be if Coakley had acted with a sense of urgency ever since the primary.”

There, do I have your curiosity piqued?   Now go call your Mom.

As we wait for PPP to release their poll tonight on the Massachusetts race, internet bloggers are leaking the most recent results from the campaign organizations’ own internal polls.  Coakley’s internal poll from yesterday has her still trailing Brown 47%-45%, which means the race continues to be essentially a dead heat.  Keep in mind that yesterday’s polls do not take into account Coakley’s gaffe regarding Curt Schilling.  Several of you have asked whether I was serious in suggesting it might cost her votes.  I actually think it won’t persuade very many who are inclined to vote for her to change their mind.   But because it seems to fit the Brown campaign frame that Coakley believes the Senate seat is hers by right and that she is out of touch with ordinary people, it certainly will be cited by lots of people who vote against her.

Meanwhile, in addition to bringing in the big guns, including Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, Coakley’s campaign has gone negative in a big way, by mailing a flier that purportedly accuses Brown of supporting legislation that would prevent rape victims from getting treatment at local hospitals.  According to Greg Sargent’s Plumline blog, this is what the flier looks like:

The claim has been raised before by Coakley, but never in this fashion to my knowledge. It centers on Brown’s vote in the state Senate for an amendment that would have exempted hospital workers – doctors, nurses or other employees – from providing emergency contraceptives to rape victims if it conflicted with the hospital workers’ religious beliefs.   The flier appears designed to shore up Coakley’s sagging support among women.  The hope, I’m guessing, is that the gambit will force Brown to spend the last two days of the campaign defending this charge rather than focusing on attacking Coakley.  The worry for Coakley  (see my interview below with Mom) is that this type of attack will turn voters off.   Again, however, she’s evidently calculated that there’s little to lose at this point.

With that in mind, I decided to conduct my own poll of women voters in Massachusetts, starting with Mom.  She’s a life-long Massachusetts resident, registered independent, but someone who has voted Democrat in recent elections.  She was a Hillary supporter in 2008, but strongly backed Obama in the presidential election.  Almost 80 years old, she still works as a cashier at the local grocery store, drives her own car (badly), owns a modest mobile home in a senior residential park, lives on a fixed income, and pays attention to the news although she is anything but a political junkie.  In short, she is precisely the voter that Coakley must reach if she is to pull this out on Tuesday.

Here is my interview with Mom. For brevity’s sake, I’ve excised the portions dealing with her posture (“I saw this woman walking in the mirror and it scared me!”); her treadmill workout (“I still don’t seem to be walking any faster”)”; her driving (don’t ask); medications; or the unexplained death of her neighbor Fred (“You know, the one with cows in his yard”).

Me:  Mom, are you planning on voting Tuesday?

Mom:  Yes, I am.

Me: Who are you voting for?

Mom:  I’m voting for Coakley.

Me:  Why Coakley?

Mom:  She’s for women. She’s strong on women’s issues.

Me:  In what sense?

Mom:  What does she do now? Attorney General?  She’s smart, has done some good things there.  I know people say she’s too serious but I think she’s smart too.

Me:  Are there particular issues she’s for that are good for women?

Mom:  I know she supports the health bill that some say is bad for women, but I’ve always believed what Ted Kennedy said – that you pass something even if it’s not perfect because you can make it better later.  That’s what she’s doing with the health bill.

Me:  Have you seen any of her advertisements?

Mom:  All the time.  I don’t like it that these advertisements are so negative.  It seems like that’s all candidates do these days is tear each other down.  Why do they have to do that?

Me:  What do you think about Barack Obama coming to support Coakley?

Mom:  I don’t really like it. He’s a powerful person.  Why does he have to come here?  It’s..it’s ..it makes her look a little weak.

Me: Do you feel like he’s meddling in local issues?

Mom: Yes, that’s it.  Meddling .. she should run on her own.

Me: So, you’re definitely going to vote for Coakley on Tuesday?

Mom:  I’m going to try.  I’ll have to remember to get someone to get me to the polling place. It’s the local school, I think.

So there you have my survey with Mom.  The only question I didn’t ask her was whether she had seen Brown’s Cosmopolitan spread, and what she thought of it.  In all candor, I don’t want to know.  She’s my Mom, after all. .

P.S. A couple of hours after completing my survey of Mom, she called back, very excited, to say that Bill Clinton had just called her.

P.S.S.  Have you called your Mom today?  If she lives in Massachusetts, you now have an excuse to do so.  Call her. Report back.

There’s finally some good polling news for Coakley – I think.  A just released Research 2000 poll has her up by 8%, 49%-41%, over Brown, with Kennedy polling at 5% and the undecideds at 5%.  (Yes, I know Research 2000 also polls for the Daily Kos.  As I’ve said many times before, all pollsters exhibit house effects.  It doesn’t mean we automatically dismiss them.)

QUESTION: If the 2010 special election for U.S. Senate were held today, would you vote for Martha Coakley, the Democrat, Scott Brown, the Republican, or Joseph Kennedy, the Libertarian candidate?

Unlike the Rasmussen polls, Research 2000 does release some of the crosstab data, and there are no real surprises.  There’s a stark gender gap in the candidates’ support, with women (52% of respondents) going for Coakley by 55%-36% with men more narrowly split for Brown at 46%-43%.  Evidently that Cosmo spread isn’t helping Brown’s cause any.  Democrats (40% of respondents) are solidly in Coakley’s corner, albeit not by as much as you might think (82%-12%) while Republicans (85%-7%, 18% of respondents) overwhelmingly back Brown.  As in previous polls, independents (42%) are breaking for Brown, but this poll has Coakley closing the gap somewhat, losing them only by 49%-36%.

That’s the good news. Here’s the worrisome news if you are a Coakley supporter.  Despite the recent debate, the hue and cry that the race is tightening and the influx of money and supporters, her support hasn’t budged; it’s still hovering just shy of 50%. Moreover, this poll employed live interviewers – not automated callers.  Why might this matter?  Because of response bias – in a heavily Democratic state like Massachusetts, I wonder whether some respondents might be reluctant to admit support for the Republican candidate who is vying for Ted Kennedy’s seat.  That is the one advantage automated calling is supposed to have – it reduces response bias in that respondents are supposedly more candid speaking to a robot.

The other omission from this poll is any indication of voter intensity; although the partisan breakdown of the respondent pool seems entirely feasible, the key to Tuesday’s election will be who shows up.  Ideally, we want some indication of that in the poll – there’s none here.  As I’ve noted in previous posts, the intensity factor seems to be favoring Brown – but that could change as word gets out that there’s a real race here.

Nonetheless, given the recent polling trends, this ought to give Coakley supporters a boost of confidence.

Meanwhile, apropos of yesterday’s post, there’s another YouTube battle brewing, this one over Brown’s claim that he’s not familiar with the Tea Party movement.  (If you view the video, take a close look at what the young kid is reading while Brown speaks. That’s the future of our country!)  And on the celebrity front, our own Doug Flutie – BC’s finest and the last man to successfully dropkick a field goal in the NFL – has endorsed Brown.

I admit I had not been paying much attention to the Massachusetts’ special election to fill the late Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat.  As a long time resident who covered Massachusetts politics for a year for a local paper there, I felt I had a pretty good read on the state’s politics.  And that experience told me that Democrat and current Attorney General Martha Coakley, by virtue of winning the Democratic primary, would win Kennedy’s seat pretty handedly over her Republican opponent Scott Brown.

But two polls released since my last post on this topic have caught my attention.  Both are bad news for Coakley.  First, a poll covering Jan. 8-10 by the Mellman group was released yesterday and it shows Coakley beating  Brown by 14%, 50%-36%, (with 6% going to 3^rd party candidate Joe Kennedy).  Why is this potentially bad news for Coakley?  Because this was an internal poll, commissioned by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.  When candidates begin releasing internal polls, two things are clear: the poll is probably the most favorable internal poll the candidate has, and it is being released because Democrats are worried about the race and are trying to influence the media coverage.

Today, a second poll came out, this one by Rasmussen – and it has Coakley up by 2%, 49%-47%, with Kennedy at 3% and 2% undecided.  In short, the race is essentially a dead heat, given the poll’s margin of error. One week ago Rasmussen had Coakley up by 9%, 50-41, with 7% undecided.   However, that poll didn’t include Kennedy as a survey option – this one does, which makes it somewhat difficult to compare the two.

In trying to project the outcome of the election a week from today, keep in mind the following points:

1. Every poll has Coakley at about 50% of the vote – the variation comes in trying to estimate Brown’s support.  This is good for Coakley because it suggests she has strong, stable and almost majority support.  But it also indicates that she has hit her ceiling, leaving Brown with the greater upside, particularly if he begins attracting the Joe Kennedy voters.  And it reminds us that turnout is the key to winning this race.

2. Both candidates are generally well liked, but voters seem to like Brown as much or more than Coakley; his unfavorables in the last two polls are actually lower than her’s, and he gets higher favorable ratings in the latest Rasmussen poll.  In fact, her unfavorables are almost twice his in the Rasmussen poll.

3. Obama’s coattails are, predictably, quite short in Massachusetts (a strong Clinton state, if you’ll recall).  Although 57% of those polled in Massachusetts by Rasmussen either strongly approve (37%) or somewhat approve (20%) of his performance, evidently that’s not translating into increased support for Coakley.

4. As an indication of the increasing concern by the Coakley camp, they made the decision to go negative with this ad that has drawn criticism (and not only because it spells Massachusetts wrong in the closing credits!) for misrepresenting Brown’s views. Brown wasted no time in running his own negative ad in response.

5. Both parties have suddenly realized there’s a race here, and money is now pouring in.  To the degree that this leads to increased turnout, I have to think this favors Coakley for reasons I discussed in my last post.

6. The polling trends don’t seem to be favoring Coakley, as the link to this pollster.com chart shows.

http://www.pollster.com/polls/ma/10-ma-gov-ge-bvco.php

But keep in mind that there has been relatively few polls to date since everyone expected a Coakley cakewalk.   I expect this race to be polled much more frequently during the last week.

The bottom line is that this race is much closer than anyone expected – if the polls can be trusted.  I remind you of my caveat regarding voting screens and predicting special elections.  Many pundits are suggesting that this race should be viewed in part as a referendum on the health care debate at the national level; Coakley supports the Senate bill, while Brown opposes it.  In looking at the polling data, however, I don’t think that’s the key issue. Instead, I think security issues are what’s driving the surprising support for Brown. Consider this bit of polling data from Rasmussen:

Should the December attempt to blow up an airliner as it was landing in Detroit be investigated by military authorities as a terrorist act or by civilian authorities as a criminal act?

65% By the military as a terrorist act
21% By civilian authorities as a criminal act
14% Not sure

Do you favor or oppose the use of full-body scanners at airports in the United States?

77% Favor
11% Oppose
12% Not sure

As I review the transcripts of the debates between Coakley and Brown, and the polling data, I wonder whether Brown has made this race competitive by seizing the high ground on the terrorist issue in the wake of the crotch-bomber incident and revelations regarding the number of released Gitmo prisoners who have rejoined the terrorist campaign against the U.S.  I wonder whether Coakley helped her cause by breaking with the President on how to deal with Afghanistan – here are her comments in the most recent debate with Brown:

DAVID GERGEN (moderator): Miss Coakley, how do you think we then succeed in Afghanistan?

COAKLEY: In Afghanistan?

GERGEN: Yes, and Pakistan.

COAKLEY: I think we have done what we are going to be able to do in Afghanistan.

GERGEN: You think we should come home?

COAKLEY: I think we should plan an exit strategy. Yes.

GERGEN: And — then how would we succeed?

COAKLEY: I’m not sure there is a way to succeed. If the goal was — and the mission in Afghanistan was to go in because we believed that the Taliban was giving harbor to terrorists. We supported that. I supported that goal. They’re gone. They’re not there anymore. They’re in, apparently Yemen, they’re in Pakistan. Let’s focus our efforts on where Al Qaeda is and not always decide that we need to —

GERGEN: Would you then send troops into Yemen where Al Qaeda is?

COAKLEY: No, I — that’s exactly the point. This is not about sending troops everywhere we think Al Qaeda may be, or where they’re training. We have all kinds of resources at our disposal, including CIA, our allies who work with us. And the focus should be getting the appropriate information on individuals who are trained, who represent a threat to us, and use the force necessary to go after those individuals.

I’m not sure, but I wonder whether this is viewed by some voters as perhaps a bit weak on the antiterrorism battle in light of the crotch bomber incident.

Will this be enough to swing the election to Brown?  I remain skeptical – the demographic and partisan leanings of Massachusetts voters still lead me to believe that Coakley will pull this out particularly since it is now clear that she’s in a real dogfight and Democrats are pouring resources into this state to prevent a monumental upset.  But Brown has shown that he is a potent fundraiser as well, and a lot can happen in a week.

In the meantime, I’m eager to hear from you – many of the regular readers of this blog are Massachusetts residents who have a keen ear for the local political scene there. What are you hearing?  Does Brown really have a chance?  If so, why?

Send me your comments!