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There’s been some new polling on statewide races from Franklin & Marshall College. As the P-G has already noted, overall the results suggest that not much has changed: For one thing, massive numbers of people haven’t picked a candidate for governor yet.
But I’d like to hone in on one weird little finding in the race for U.S. Senate.
That race will almost certainly feature Republican Pat Toomey facing the winner of this May’s Democratic primary — either incumbent Arlen Specter or challenger Joe Sestak. If you look at results among registered voters, things don’t look so bad for the Dems. Here’s how Franklin & Marshall breaks down the possible November match-ups:
33% Specter, 29% Toomey
25% Toomey, 22% Sestak
But when F&M considers “likely voters,” the result is much different
44% Toomey, 34% Specter
38% Toomey, 20% Sestak
See what happened there? The Dems did about the same among both groups of voters … but when you focus on likely voters, Toomey got a double-digit percentage point increase.
Others noticed the disparity as well. The DailyKos observed that “there is usually some gap between registered voters and likely voters, but this strikes me as more than a little absurd.”
What’s going on here? I put a call into Terry Madonna, F&M’s polling guru. Madonna acknowledges there’s “a big swing in those numbers,” but that they reflect a race where a lot is in flux. “Polls are all over the place now,” he says. But he adds that in any case, the numbers show an uphill climb for Dems.
As noted here previously, there’s no fixed definition of a “likely” voter — different pollsters determine who is likely based on a variety of different questions and procedures. In this case, Madonna says he determined a voter was “likely” to vote based on previous voting history and how closely the voter claimed to be watching the campaign.
Madonna then used a very narrow cohort of voters: The ones whose answers suggested they would vote in an election where turnout was only in the mid-30-percent range. That’s “probably on the low end” of what turnout has been in similar contests, he says — a somewhat less pessimistic forecast on turnout would have improved numbers for the Dems. But “To be candid, I don’t have a clue about what turnout will be in November. So many things can happen between now and then.”
What the numbers reflect now, he says, is a serious “enthusiasm deficit” among Democratic voters. The voters signalling a strong interest in this race now are disproportionately Republican, which explains why Toomey does so much better among “likely” voters.
“I think Democrats will lose lots of seats this year,” Madonna predicts. “There are cycles in politics, and you can’t usually reverse these trends completely. But if Democrats can increase their turnout, they can maybe mitigate some of the damage.”
I’ve raised the enthusiasm gap before. But I’ve cited it as a reason for why Sestak could be a larger threat to Toomey than Specter. Clearly, this poll only supports the first part of my argument. I mean, if Sestak were lighting people up, you’d think that he would fare better in a poll of likely voters as well.
There’s no question the guy is trying — he’s been out here in western PA a lot more than Specter has, and his campaign staff is, well, highly dedicated. But I just don’t see sign that he’s getting much traction.
If he’s lucky, that’s just because of the icy road conditions of recent weeks — people might be too busy digging out their cars to dig into the issues. But the way these numbers are shaping up, there may be a bigger storm in the offing.
This article appears in Feb 25 – Mar 3, 2010.
Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight debunked F&M’s “likely voter” screen last month in looking at a similar PA poll by F&M: http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2010/01/arlen-specter-may-be-screwed-but-he.html
Specter is a known quantity to most Pennsylvanians, so he has very little room to grow his poll numbers. Sestak is still unknown to a LOT of Pennsylvanians, but he has $6 million (maybe more now) he’ll use to change that.
I certainly agree with your assessment of Specter not having much of an upside compared to Sestak, because Specter is a known quantity. Though as I’ve said up above — time is slipping away for Sestak to begin making some kind of inroads.
To Silver’s point, I’ll just say that Madonna and I discussed this at some length. Madonna provided both sets of numbers — likely voters and registered voters — to give a sense of the extremes. My guess is that if you polled the voters who are actually going to turn out on Election Day — assuming you had some magical way of knowing who they are now — you’d get a result somewhere between those two sets of figures.
For my purposes, I’m mostly interested in what the numbers suggest about enthusiasm for these candidates. Clearly Democrats need to find some way of changing that dynamic between now and November, no matter who wins the primary. For the reason you state, I’m worried that it will be harder to drum up excitement about Specter.
Taking the likely voter / unlikely voter issue with a grain (a grain) of salt, I read this all as: if Obama gets involved, the less likely voters will show and the Dems compete in the competitive paradigm, if Obama does not get sufficiently involved, Dems probably will not excite their voter pool with bright lights and big history enough to be competitive with Toomey and the Republicans this year. So my first question is, what makes Obama more likely to get involved?
If Arlen wins, Obama will probably assume “the old pro can do it mostly by himself”, not to mention decline so often in taking hits from his left for appearing as an apologist for moderation, or from the center for campaigning when he should be, you know, governing.
If Sestak wins, recent spat aside I think he is actually much more ideologicially simpatico with the President, not to mention he’ll clearly need all the help he can get. And campaigning with a liberal 3-star admiral might actually HELP the President govern, in as much as he’ll be making some of his own arguments. So at the very least, I can see Sestak-Toomey being far more exciting.