Three late polls, and more lofty thoughts
Three late breaking polls
We have launched three late-breaking polls into interesting and critical races, Nevada Senate, Texas Senate and CA-22 – all polls make use of our newly developed method, Calibrated Polling, making use of live-updating early voting data to calibrate our expectations of the turnout space.
Let’s start with the letter: We have seen some internal campaign data suggesting this race was nudging closer to Democratic challenger Andrew Janz, but not in our poll. With about 500 respondents, we show a clear and strong lead for Russia’s favorite congressman, Devin Nunes. We have Nunes up by 13 points; he was already running well ahead of our national generic ballot model in our early voting estimates. Incredibly, Nunes gets good marks on handling the investigation into Russia meddling in the US 2016 election (43% approve), and Governor Jerry Brown gets the bulk of the blame for the CA-22 water crisis (34%). Unsurprisingly, the water crisis is the most important issue in this district (40% selected this issue as the most important one).
Next up, Nevada. Here, Jacky Rosen is ahead in the two-party vote, but the margin is super-slim (2 percentage points). A majority of likely voters remember that incumbent “Dirty” Dean Heller voted to confirm Kavanaugh (53%) – real baggage for him. In contrast, only 34% correctly identify his affirmative vote for the Republican Tax Bill, slashing taxes for the rich. The most important issue here is pre-existing conditions in healthcare (27%), followed by the caravan of immigrants in Latin America (24%).
Last, we have of course Texas. As we noted before, early vote to date in the 30 most populous counties has outstripped vote tallies on election day 2014 already. For our calibrated polling, we have analyzed more than 5.5 Million early votes. And, things are tightening and tightening. We were in the field again over the weekend, with some concern that specious stories about a Beto campaign staffer involved in transferring funds Honduran migrants could worsen Beto’s chances, but we see no sign of it, quite to the contrary. In the two-party vote, we have Beto down by less than 2 ppt., 1.5 ppt to be exact. This is virtually the same compared to our first round of polling in collaboration with NowThis, even a little tighter. One word about the minority vote here: These numbers are lightly very noisy; the more important point: minority turnout is crucial, Go Vote! The most important issue remains pre-existing conditions here (28%), closely followed by the caravan (27%). On that note, almost 70% believe that cities that arrest illegal immigrants for crimes should be required to turn them over to immigration authorities.
Big Picture
As in the past, we have used our data collection efforts and analytics to dive into the horse race a little bit. We have worked with progressive campaigns, and have tracked 40 of the most competitive districts in private, candidate-specific polling. We have also tracked all 435 Congressional districts with our national generic ballot model – built on top of 3 Million responses from 200,000 respondents and 30 Million behavioral data points. But, we believe that our analytics are much more powerful in addressing the top of the funnel – what issues to talk about, how to reach voters other than marginal voters who might agree with us on policies. Policies, and related value frames or psychometrics, have been at the core of our data collection efforts, and this is were the data infrastructure is seriously broken in comparison to Republican efforts. PredictWise is in the game to fix it; stay tuned for more.