As has already been widely reported, the latest Elway Poll has Sen. Patty Murray leading real estate speculator Dino Rossi by 50-41%, which is pretty damn consistent with internal Democratic polling, including a recently released DSCC poll that showed Murray up 50-45%.
Curiously, and unlike previous campaigns, not a single Rossi/Republican internal poll has been leaked, suggesting that their numbers don’t diverge much from the Democrats. Of course, recent SurveyUSA and Rasmussen polls showed Rossi in the lead,but the crosstabs suggest SurveyUSA’s sample is totally whacked, while Rasmussen generally leans Republican until the final weeks of the campaign. So both my brain and my gut still tell me that the edge goes to Murray.
That said, the only the poll that matters is the one that closes 8PM, November 2. So Dems better get their shit together and vote, or else.
Update [Darryl]: Elsewhere I do a little number crunching with this poll and other recent polls in this race.
Uhhh…look at May poll by Elway. Rossi was at 34. Rossi jumped 7 points. Murray lost 2.
Murray keeps losing ground…
Wow. Only 7 weeks from Election Day and Rossi leads cigaret smoke by 3 points. Wow. But hey, the good news for GOPers is Rossi is 37 points ahead of Low Tax Looper.
Low Tax Looper, in case you don’t know, was the only candidate on the ballot in a Tennessee state senate race in which, running as a Republican, he lost to a Democratic write-in candidate by 96% to 4%.
The reason Looper was the only candidate on the ballot is because he murdered his Democratic opponent 29 days before the election, and under Tennessee laws existing at the time, a dead candidate couldn’t be replaced after 30 days prior to the election. Looper figured he’d waltz into office. He was wrong. The victim’s widow ran against him as a write-in and got 96% of the votes. She’s still a state senator today. And Looper is still a permanent resident of the Tennessee prison system.
Let’s just hope Patty can keep her Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior a secret for another couple months.
@1
Nice try. Great spin. You must work for Rossi’s campaign.
You fail to mention that Sen. Murray has gained 3 points since Elway’s June poll, while Rossi has remained stagnant.
http://www.pollster.com/blogs/.....y_6913.php
You also fail to mention that Elway’s May poll was taken before Rossi was an official candidate, making that poll meaningless.
All along, Sen. Murray has been just under 50%, while Rossi is at the low 40’s. How does Rossi get to 50%? Everyone knows both candidates well. Both candidates will have a ton of money, though Murray will probably still outspend Rossi. And Democrats will vote in the same numbers that they did in 2006. Maybe even better than 2006 since we are fired up to pass 1098 and defeat more of Tim Eyman’s crappy initiatives. Plus there are no third party candidates to take away votes from Sen. Murray.
So how does Rossi get to 50% exactly?
@1
Oh and actually you are wrong about that May poll as well. Sen. Murray actually only lost one point, which is of course statistically insignificant.
http://www.pollster.com/blogs/....._42952.php
SurveyUSA tends to overstate Republican strength. Remember how close they had the Constantine-Hutchison race last year?
Elway tends to understate Republican strength. For example, back on 7/22-31/08, Elway had Gregoire ahead of Rossi by 16 points. Gregoire won by “only” 6.5% in 2008.
Rasmussen seems to be the most accurate of major pollsters — and certainly far more accurate than SurveyUSA or Elway. To the extent Rasmussen showed more Republican strength in the months prior to the 2008 election — there was a general collapse of Republican strength everywhere in the last several weeks before November 2008.
So I would say it is too close to call. Rasmussen has changed the lead in its poll nearly every time a new poll comes out, and all of them have been within the margin of error.
No, Richard.
Rasmussen was relatively accurate … in 2006 and 2008, and on late-season polls after the issues and parameters of the races were already established. Also, when they were doing only a few well-designed polls.
Now they do a blizzard of polls, something like half of all polls done anywhere in the country in 2010. And, at least in the early parts of the political season, they’ve been shown to be consistently slanting their polling techniques to the advantage of Republicans.
Of course, we’d know even more about the biases built into their results if they did a more comprehensive job of displaying their crosstabs. At least SUSA showed the utter ridiculousness of their poll with that absurd “metro Seattle” result.
N in Seattle @ 8
Actually, Rasmussen is pretty much on the dollar. And definitely not slanted to the Republicans. Look at their record from the same time two years ago.
There were 12 major polls published on the presidential race for the week of 09/05/2008 to 09/11/2008.
The majority of these polls predicted that McCain would be elected president. The USA Today/Gallup poll (certainly NOT a Republican organization) predicted that McCain would win by a whopping 10 points.
Rasmussen was only one of two polls (out of 12) predicting an Obama win. While Rasmussen showed Obama only up by one point (Obama ended up winning by 7.3%), Rasmussen had the most favorable result towards Obama of any of the major polls:
Newsweek 09/10 – 09/11 1038 RV 3.8 46 46 Tie
GWU/Battleground 09/07 – 09/11 1000 LV 3.1 44 48 McCain +4
Associated Press/GfK 09/05 – 09/10 812 LV — 44 48 McCain +4
FOX News 09/08 – 09/09 900 RV 3.0 42 45 McCain +3
Gallup Tracking 09/07 – 09/09 2714 RV 2.0 43 48 McCain +5
Rasmussen Tracking 09/07 – 09/09 3000 LV 2.0 48 47 Obama +1
Hotline/FD Tracking 09/07 – 09/09 902 RV 3.2 45 45 Tie
NBC News/Wall St. Jrnl 09/06 – 09/08 860 RV 3.3 46 45 Obama +1
ABC News/Wash Post 09/05 – 09/07 LV 3.0 47 49 McCain +2
USA Today/Gallup 09/05 – 09/07 823 LV 4.0 44 54 McCain +10
CBS News* 09/05 – 09/07 655 RV 4.0 44 46 McCain +2
CNN/OpinionResearch 09/05 – 09/07 942 RV 3.0 48 48 Tie
Palm, meet forehead .
Forehead, meet desk .
Here is one discussion of Ras. There are many others.
Cynner! Where are you! Read @9 and @10 before they take ’em back!
Regardless of what the polls say, get off your backside and hit your closest phone bank or canvassing event for Senator Murray, if you want to ensure her victory.
There are a LOT of frustrated folks out there who are easier targets than usual for the lies being promoted by Republicans, conservatives and corporate hacks, and if they aren’t reminded of all the work she’s done on behalf of the citizens of Washington, they’ll go with who appeals to their frustration most.
People usually beat money. If enough people get involved.
Turnout will beat any of the polls.
Candidates, and even the political hacks, tend to forget that election day is now about two weeks long, with the all-mail ballot. Those who wait for the last week for their final push will find that about 2/3 of the ballots are already in the mail.
Time to get out of there and claim your neighborhood! While the weather is still tolerable, schedule a neighborhood BBQ in your back yard, and make sure everybody there gets the non-Fox version of the events. If you have to man the grill, arrange to have some others there to discuss politics with the guests. Make sure everyone knows that you aren’t fooled by the tea-party sloganeering, and neither should they be fooled.
I usually mail mine back the same day it arrives.
Richard et al.
Rasmussen tracking polls are demonstrably biased to the right (i.e. higher approval for Bush and lower for Obama) relative to almost all other presidential approval polls.
But Rasmussen’s head-to-head general election polls are pretty good, although I am aware of the arguments that they shift from R biased to neutral as the elections approach. (I don’t really buy it.)
As for Washington state polls, Rasmussen was not really more accurate than most other pollsters late in the last gubernatorial (Gregoire v Rossi) race. Here is a graphic:
Except for Elway, they are all pretty much within the margin of error for each poll.
Notice that the Rasmussen trend is consistent with the conspiracy theory….
I just got polled by Rasmussen tonight.
They are laughably biased towards Republicans.
Transparent even. You would have to be a real moran to not see that.
Danny,
Cool.
Was the Rasmussen poll for Murray v Rossi or Obama approval/generic congressional ballot?
You can have a lot of bias on “approval” polls. A lot can depend on how the question is asked. When it comes to candidate polls, harder to do, since a person has to pick someone or no one. Also, candidate polls are tested with actual elections, while there is nothing to test approval polls against.
The “approval index” on Rasmussen is particularly biased, since it subtracts strong disapprovers from strong approvers. While the overall approval is pretty close, there are a lot more strong disapprovers of Obama than strong approvers.
But that is a methodology issue. I imagine Bush had the same problem, with his supporters being mild in their support and his opponents being strong in their opposition.
Richard,
“You can have a lot of bias on “approval” polls.”
Yep.
“The “approval index” on Rasmussen is particularly biased, since it subtracts strong disapprovers from strong approvers.”
Nope…that is a recent thing from Rasmussen. They still give the full set of numbers. I am talking about the total approval and total disapproval numbers…compared to other pollsters doing the same thing.