2018 Congressional Generic Ballot and House Polls Megathread - the original

[Florida Man for Crime]

Apparently the political environment changes rapidly.



Next up, in the evening we over-react to the primary results.

[Florida Man for Crime]

Remember that last Ipsos poll with a sudden jump to R+5?  Yes, boys and girls, this is what we call an "outlier".  New poll:

D: 42 (+6)
R: 34 (-7)

Reuters isn't really a poll, it is more like tarot cards or sheep entrails.

[Florida Man for Crime]

This is kind of interesting.  I hadn't realized it's been so long since there was a live interview poll.

https://twitter.com/Nate_Cohn/status/1000809842351656960

I feel like this is a significant part of why the GCB has shifted. Lower quality pollsters are dominating this month for some reason.

Bingo. It's all been Reuters, Rasmussen, YouGov, etc. We haven't gotten one from Quinnipac in a long time.

With the rise of cell phones and lower response rates, good quality polling has gotten really expensive and therefore rare.

Yup. The online ones are really bouncy, too, making it hard to get an accurate picture (like Reuters swinging by 13 points).

This is one reason why I am inclined to think that the generic congressional ballot may be a bit less predictive than it has been in the past. At least to the extent that it is more dominated by internet polls than in the past, it makes sense to put more focus on special election results and probably most importantly on the actions of the DCCC/NRCC. At the end the real tell for how the election is breaking will be when the two committees make their final ad reservations.

[Florida Man for Crime]

(PPP) PA-16

Mike Kelly (R) - 48%
Ron DiNicola (D) - 43%

Wow- Trump won PA-16 by 20%.

It is not entirely implausible that this seat could be somewhat competitive. This is the district with Erie, which swung HARD to Trump, but the congressional district with Erie voted for Obama in 2008. In that respect it is actually better ground for ancestral Dem resurgence than southwest Pennsylvania (which never came close to voting for Obama). It is the sort of place where Conor Lamb is an indicator of what could be possible, at least with a very good candidate. But the flip side is the current PA-16 doesn't have any Pittsburgh suburbs that Lamb thrived in.

[Florida Man for Crime]

Hillary only won the district by 1.5, whereas Romney won it by 21. It still has some GOP DNA, even if it is shifting super fast. Dems depend on young voters to win districts like this, and young people will be turning out poorly in this midterm, just as they always do in this midterm.

This is true. If anything, TX-07 doesn't just have GOP DNA, it is *THE* Texas Republican district. It was George H. W. Bush's congressional district. It was the first congressional district that Texas Republicans managed to win in the process of turning Texas from a Dixiecrat state to a Republican sate. So the fact that there is even a chance of it falling now is really an indictment of how far the Republican party has fallen in the places that were formally, from roughly Nixon through Romney, their premier strongholds.

Likewise with TX-32, the Dallas equivalent of TX-07.

[Florida Man for Crime]

Usually the Pub does better rather than worse with LV's versus RV's.  That suggests a malaise problem for the Pubs, or maybe an indicator that the SES profile of Pub voters on average as fallen in the Trump era, or both. 

Also, I know that MoCo only makes up 80,000 people of this district and the MoE is crazy with this sub-sample, but Wallace dominates there 52-31. Could make up the difference in the end.

Also look at the education differential:

Whites (no degree): Fitzgerald 59-33
Whites (with degree): Wallace 50-43
Non-whites: Wallace 51-32

This does suggest that at least a significant part of the difference between RV and LV (although surely some is also coming from Pub malaise as well).

Less educated voters drop off in midterms much more than educated voters do. So while Pubs have traditionally done relatively better with LVs than RVs because of higher socioeconomic status of Pubs, that will be less the case now.

In basically all suburban districts in which Dems are doing better with educated white voters (particularly in ones with few minorities, such as in the Philly suburbs), we should expect to see this sort of dynamic.

On the other hand, in districts where Dems are more reliant on minority voters and young voters (who drop off in midterms at higher than average rates), Pubs are more likely to still do better with LVs than with RVs.

[Florida Man for Crime]

Staten Island = worthless.

[Florida Man for Crime]

Two more polls showing the Democrats regaining their edge-

YouGov

Democrats: 44% (+2)
Republicans: 38% (-1)


Rasmussen

Democrats: 45% (+2)
Republicans: 41% (-1)

But Reuters told me Red Wave (before it didn't).

[Florida Man for Crime]

Some good recent numbers for Democrats. But where are the live caller polls?

Oh, so NOW you want live caller polls.

[Florida Man for Crime]

Ipsos tracker (5-day rolling), June 3-7, 1322 registered voters

D 43 (+2)
R 34 (-1)

The 538 average is now D+8.2, which is the largest gap since April.

What reuters giveth, reuters taketh away just as quickly.

[Florida Man for Crime]

it is gonna crash

BREAKING!!! The crash begins!

Reuters poll shows impending Democratic collapse.

Democrats have lost their momentum in the fabulously accurate and reliable Reuters poll (June 7-11).

Dem 43.3% (-.3%)
Rep 34.3%(+0%)

#TheDeclineAndFallOfTheBlueWave #RedWaveIsComing cc: LimoLiberal, Sean Trende

What Reuters giveth, Reuters taketh away.

[Florida Man for Crime]

Wellp, the Democratic collapse continues in the reuters poll

Dem: 42.4% (-1.4%)
Rep: 36.9% (+.9%)

June 10-June 14

I'm not sure how the Ds can hope to recover from this.

#redwave cc: LimoLiberal, Sean Trende

[Florida Man for Crime]

Link: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/docs/Gravis_Montana_June_2018.pdf

Williams (D): 49
Gianforte (R): 43

469 LV; June 11-13

So this is from the same poll that has Tester up 7. That makes me doubt whether Tester being up 7 there is really accurate, as they seem to have basically the same number for MT-AL.

One would expect probably more ticket splitting in this race.

[Florida Man for Crime]

OJEDA!!!

Monmouth poll... heatcharger posted it in the Senate polls subforum (along with WV-SEN), but this sort of belongs here as well because of the house poll.


WV-3:

Ojeda 43%
Miller 41%

Standard model:

Ojeda 47%
Miller 41%

Dem surge:

Ojeda 48%
Miller 39%


Ojeda is apparently as good of a candidate as Amy McGrath.

[Florida Man for Crime]

So if Ds could win WV-03 and every district that voted for Trump by a smaller margin than it, they would have a 420-15 majority in the House.

[Florida Man for Crime]

So if Ds could win WV-03 and every district that voted for Trump by a smaller margin than it, they would have a 420-15 majority in the House.

Sure, technically, but Ojeda's success is more district and candidate-specific than a sign of a D+3481921 tsunami.

For sure. I am only trying to put context on how anomalous it is for a Democrat to be able to win a district that Trump won by 50 points (rather a lot!).

[Florida Man for Crime]

And yet, despite what at least I see as painfully obvious, people like LimoLiberal (you also give me this impression with posts like that) seem completely oblivious, having grown up in a world where the vast majority of elections favored Republicans, and thus lack any objective idea of how elections work. No matter what data or trends they read, there is always a voice in the back of their head saying Republicans will win somehow.

If anything, you are giving them too much credit.

It is not even actually true that the vast majority of recent elections have favored Republicans, except in a vary narrow and selective definition of what constitutes a "recent" election.

Yes, Republicans did very well in 2014 (and 2010, though not quite so much then in the Senate).

But did they do especially well in 2012? Certainly not. Obama was re-elected easily, and Dems won a huge number of Senate seats (which is why there are so many D Senate seats to defend now in 2018). D's didn't do better in the house, but that was only because of gerrymandering, and iirc they won the House popular vote.

And then there was 2016. Yes, Trump won the electoral college. But he lost the popular vote, and Ds picked up small amounts of seats in both the House and the Senate. It was basically a neutral election, not a GOP election.

So the only way that one could think that Republicans have done especially well in recent elections is by basically only focusing on 2014, interpreting 2016 in a rosier (for the GOP) manner than is reasonable, not looking at earlier elections (which are not that long ago in political time) such as 2012 and 2008, and entirely ignoring the 2017 elections and all the special elections that have occurred since 2016.

[Florida Man for Crime]

Additionally, meeting with Russian officials is not illegal, nor was being backed by Russia openly during the election. Hillary was openly backed by most of the world’s leaders and no one is clamoring for an investigation into it.

What exactly do you mean by "backed?" If all that Putin did was say "Trump is a good guy, I hope America elects him, you should," that would not be a big deal. Although I don't think that most world leaders actually even went that far in terms of "openly backing" Hillary.

But that is not what Putin did, and that is not the issue. The issue is that Putin conducted foreign intelligence operations aimed against Clinton and aimed at supporting Trump. Are you saying that world leaders conducted foreign intelligence operations aimed against Trump and aimed at supporting Clinton?

You must be logged in to read this quote.

Wait, was Access Hollywood tapes a result of a foreign intelligence operation?

You must be logged in to read this quote.

It is a crime (namely espionage) to support a foreign intelligence operation against the United States. So there is a question of to what extent (if any) Trump and/or people on his campaign did that, which is TBD by Mueller.