NC-PPP: Cooper (D) leads McCrory (R) by 3

[MT Treasurer]

Pat McCrory (R, inc.): 40%
Roy Cooper (D): 43%

Pat McCrory (R, inc.): 43%
Ken Spaulding (D): 34%

Election for state legislature:

Would support Republican candidate: 42%
Would support Democratic candidate: 42%

McCrory approval rating: 35/48

http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/main/2016/01/cooper-burr-begin-2016-with-leads-in-north-carolina.html

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yuge

[windjammer]

I guess until the general election this is going to be so close?

[Miles]

I guess until the general election this is going to be so close?

Yes - I've been saying that for months.

[Amenhotep Bakari-Sellers]

Dems can win in IN and MO. And Phil Scott is favored in VT. Any of these races can go either way.

[Xing]

Seems McCrory is likely to underperform the Republican nominee, which definitely puts this race in play for Democrats.

[ProgressiveCanadian]

Seems McCrory is likely to underperform the Republican nominee, which definitely puts this race in play for Democrats.

[pbrower2a]

An incumbent with 40% at this stage is in a very bad position even with a lead. McCrory can win, but he has his work cut out for him.  This is old analysis relevant to 2006-2009 for incumbent Governors and Senators who have been elected before.

Hardly anyone expects a repeat of a 2010 or 2014 electorate. This is a Presidential year, and it will more resemble 2004 (least favorable to Democrats), 2008 (most favorable to Democrats) or 2012 (in between). Still, just about  any incumbent previously elected has shown that he can campaign competently for re-election, and whether he wins or loses will depend upon

(1) the competence of his opponent, which is usually in doubt, and
(2) the satisfaction that voters have with the incumbent at the start of the campaign.

If an incumbent politician pol shows evidence of starting with 35% or so of the vote, then he is unlikely to run. He might be grossly incompetent, extreme, or corrupt and likely to lose.  

I have this qualification this year: there will be plenty of Koch-aine supplied to Republican campaigns that have any chance of winning in 2016. Maybe that changes everything; maybe it doesn't.

From hereon it is Nate Silver, and not I:

  



 Incumbents almost always get a larger share of the actual vote than they do in early polls (as do challengers). They do not “get what they get in the tracking”; they almost always get more.

 However, the incumbent’s vote share in early polls may in fact be a better predictor of the final margin in the race than the opponent’s vote share. That is, it may be proper to focus more on the incumbent’s number than the opponent’s when evaluating such a poll — even though it is extremely improper to assume that the incumbent will not pick up any additional percentage of the vote.

....

This analysis focuses only on early polls: those conducted between January and June of an incumbent’s election year. I do not attempt to evaluate such claims with respect to late polls, such as those conducted in the weeks immediately preceding an election. It is late polls which are traditionally the subject of the so-called “incumbent rule“, which is the idea that voters who remain undecided late in the race tend to break toward the challenger at the ballot booth. (Note, however, the evidence for the late version of the incumbent rule is also mixed.)

5 of the 15 incumbents to have under 45 percent of the vote in early polls also won their elections. These were Bob Menendez (38.9 percent), Tim Palwenty (42.0 percent), Don Carcieri (42.3 percent), Jennifer Granholm (43.4 percent) and Arnold Schwarzenegger (44.3 percent), all in 2006.

.....

On average, the incumbent added 6.4 percent to his voting total between the early polling average and the election, whereas the challenger added 4.5 percent. Looked at differently, the incumbent actually picked up the majority — 59 percent — of the undecided vote vis-a-vis early polls.

....

Finally, although this is not apparent from the graph itself, it does appear to be the case that the incumbent’s share of the vote is a better predictor of the final voting margin than the challenger’s share. The correlation between the incumbent’s vote share in early polls and the final voting margin is .85; the correlation between the challenger’s vote share and the final margin has a smaller magnitude, at (negative) .80. Interestingly, the correlation between the margin in early polls and the final margin is also just .85 — no better than that obtained from looking at the incumbent’s vote share alone. This may suggest that the opponent’s vote share provides little additional informational value once the incumbent’s vote share is known. As I hope I’ve made clear, however, this does not mean that incumbents “get what they get in the tracking”; they almost always add to their number. It is probably OK to focus on an incumbent’s vote share in early polls while downplaying the challenger’s number, but if you do, you need to add 6-7 percent to it to have the most accurate prediction of his likely performance in November. ...

A table of all races included in the analysis follows below.

[Adam Griffin]

Cooper will need to have a consistent lead of at least this much in the final weeks before the election in order to win, if NC's electorate is anything like GA's. Those final undecideds may break really hard for McCrory. I'm also skeptical that McCrory's approvals will look like this come election time.