Do you think democratic internals saw this coming?

[Matty]

I'm sure at least SOME of these guys who got "upset" by republicans were told by advisers that they were in trouble. Pat quinn, Davis, the Maryland governor, Hagan, etc- do you think at least a few of these guys knew they were going to lose based on last minute internals?

[Mehmentum]

I'm pretty sure Warner was completely blindsided.  I don't completely blame him.

[IceSpear]

Not even Republican internals saw it coming, so probably not.

[jd1433]

Not even Republican internals saw it coming, so probably not.

There were comments that the deterioration happening on the Dem side never really subsided. Both sides point to the exact same date where that steady deterioration began and it never stopped.


There were rumors on the GOP side of the aisle in the last week or so that things were actually better than being reported. Hell those rumors got even loud enough that they made it on RCP's VA Senate notes. But I also think that when one side is seeing information like that they see no benefit in letting it be known.

I suspect the Dems were made aware in the last week as well because I remember all of sudden the news from the Dem side just grew massively more negative, depressive, etc. approximately around Wed last week... and I thought the insiders knew something they didn't want to publicize.


Both sides when the election results were coming in admitted to saying that all of sudden at the last minute "the bottom fell out" (a repeated statement). That tells me that over the weekend and going into Monday... full panic ensued.


But even then I don't think any of them predicted to this extent.

[○∙◄☻¥tπ[╪AV┼cVê└]

No. The Democratic leadership is generally pretty clueless.

[Mr. Reactionary]

Something this powerful couldn't have been completely hidden, but it seems like the pollsters in VA and MD learned from Eric Cantor's internal guy.

[jd1433]

Let me put it this way. I'm not a pollster so feel free to take this with a grain of salt, but...

Let's say I'm in the war room in the NRCC, DCCC, NRSC, etc. and it's my job to handle polling. Now obviously I could just hire a bunch of firms and aggregate it like RCP, but how useful is that? It's not. Why? Because I would be letting my job depend way to much on the possibility of accidental biases showing up in the results or in bad weighting of the polls.

I need something better than that. How would I get something better?

It's conceivable that you could use questions related to absentee ballots to "true up" the polling in all kinds of aspects such as (likelihood to vote, verifying actual absentee data against polled question data to verify sample, etc.).

Now lets just say I did ^that. Well if for example I had a turnout problem it would start showing up a little bit a couple weeks out (but that's noise, right?), then it would be "oh this doesn't look good," and then you wake up one day to realize your polls had a projected absentee distribution of x at this stage (lets say 1 week out) of the race and instead you have actual absentees of way <x. You would panic at this stage too, but would you necessarily want to come out to the national media and say "Hey you know all of those professional polls? Yeah well they're grossly overestimating z, it's really going to be a blowout!"
A) If you're on the GOP side nobody is going to believe you publicly anyway
B) If you're on the Dem side sparking full scale panic isn't usually something you unilaterally do directly
C) It's kind of unproductive to exert effort trying to sell the media on something that isn't really going to help you change the course of the election anyway.
D) At this moment in time you know that you know a piece of information and that your opponent may or may not know this piece of information. What do you stand to gain by sharing this piece of information with the public and therefore your opponent? Not much.

So it's not surprising that it was kept quiet regardless if they knew or didn't know. All I can say is that:
1) The national committees are remarkably good at knowing when to enter and exit spending on a race *if it's on their radar*.
2) There was really a day last week where the entire tone of election analysts just completely changed. It reeked of "something leaked and it's not good for Dems"
3) There are likely too many ways for a national committee to get a better idea of a race by combining a lot of non public information for them to be completely clueless of whether or not things are trending worse or better than the RCP average.

[Senate Minority Leader Lord Voldemort]

No. The Democratic leadership is generally pretty clueless.

[Ljube]

A couple of days before the election, Pelosi sent an email to donors claiming that they were facing a catastrophe if they couldn't come up with 5 million $. The wording of the email was such that it seemed she knew what she was facing.

Rumors about Virginia being closer than it seemed abounded on RCP, which I promptly dismissed due to the site's GOP lean.

Republican strategists were pretty confident about Iowa and Colorado. They were claiming that North Carolina was tightening and was in play. That's a few days before the election. Interestingly enough, they weren’t as confident about New Hampshire.

Democrats dispatched Obama to Wisconsin a few days before the election. That is a desperate move you would take only if you are losing by a lot.

So, it seems, both sides knew what was going to happen.