Polling Redux

A good friend of mine, Hank Pyro, wrote an article on opinion polls at his now defunct website. It got some attention and nolanchart asked Hank to repost it on their site. We tried to post it here but the charts and graphs don't post right and it takes too long to troubleshoot. We are linking to nolanchart.com with a few disclaimers. Nolanchart cannot handle special characters (quotation marks and apostrophes.) It is a distraction but you can get the gist of it.

http://www.nolanchart.com/article667.html

The article was written prior to Hank's discovering Scott Rasmussen. Prior to Rasmussen, all public consumption polls were bullshit. Post Rasmussen, all public consumption polls not named Rasmussen are bullshit. Odd, but polls frequently favor the candidate endorsed by the pollsters. Case in point, "The Boston Globe" had Scott Brown trailing Martha Coakley (whom they endorsed) by 15 points about two weeks before their election.

Which brings us to the state of the art of political polling. I believe the pollsters are underselling the demise of the Democrats. Rasmussen is great but not all of his polling is for public consumption. He gives freebie snapshots. I cannot justify paying for his expertise.

Larry Sabato is a rival/chum/friend of Rasmussen. I thought Rasmussen had linked or posted some of Sabato's numbers but now I can't find those links. But here are Sabato's predictions:

http://www.centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/articles/category/2010-senate/

Sabato has the Indiana Senate race in a toss-up. Rasmussen has the Dem trailing three Republican candidates, two by double digits and one of those by eighteen points. From my correspondents in the Hoosier State I get the distinct impression that the Democrat is in big trouble.

Sabato has the GOP picking up 7 Senate seats and 27 House seats. Usual disclaimer, if the race was held today. But I think the Dems are in worse shape than that, especially in the House. In the coming weeks we will point out some Democratic soft spots that have not been acknowledged.