A new poll was released today in the race between Rep. Jay Inslee (D-WA-1) and state AG Rob McKenna (R). The poll of 500 “Washington registered voters who are likely to vote in the November…election” was taken from 21 to 23 February. The margin of error is 4.4%.
The poll shows the candidate’s favorable/unfavorables about tied at 33%/21% for Inslee and 33%/20% for McKenna. Here is the key result:
This makes the second consecutive poll showing the race a tie. A PPP poll taken a few days earlier had the candidates tied at 42%. A SurveyUSA poll taken a week earlier had McKenna leading Inslee 49% to 39%.
The polling history for this race shows that McKenna held a solid lead in the fall of 2011 that lasted into mid-February 2012.
The three most recent polls in this race are nearly contiguous, covering a period from the 13th to the 23rd of February with only a 2 day gap between the two most recent polls. Therefore, I’ve pooled them to give a snapshot of the race for the second half of February. This yields a sample of 2,336 “votes” of which 1,945 go to either McKenna or Inslee. McKenna leads Inslee 42.9% to 40.4%.
A Monte Carlo analysis of a million simulated elections using this sample yields 179,027 wins for Inslee and 817,061 wins for McKenna. The results suggest that, if the election had been held during the second half of February, McKenna would have won with an 82% probability and Inslee would have won with an 18% probability. Here is the distribution of election outcomes:
The analysis does not, of course, consider the trend over the last three polls. The two most recent polls must give Inslee supporters a big sigh of relief and some hope in what was shaping up to be a certain victory for McKenna.
[The most recent analysis for this race is here]
I don’t see anything in the local news cycles which would account for any change in voter’s opinions of the candidates. McKenna is keeping very quiet right now, which is probably a smart move for someone who appeared to be in the front-runner position. Inslee’s been tied up with other work and hasn’t made any visible campaign effort, at least not what has been tracked in the local news.
It looks to me that 25% is still squarely on the fence as “undecided”, and a lot of the support for both McKenna and Inslee is rather soft (“leaning” one way or another). Thee is still lots of room in this race for things to change.
Inslee’s best chance at winning is to make sure Democrats turn out the vote in large numbers, like they did in 2008. This is one race where President Obama’s coattails may be very long.
@1
I’m not sure how long Obama’s coattails will be. I plan on voting straight Dem with the exception of Obama (I’ll vote for either the Green Party candidate or Rocky Anderson), so I’m probably an outlier but I still think the Democratic base is pretty disappointed and discouraged by Obama. If Obama’s coattails are needed for an Inslee victory, the best thing going for Inslee is the clown car parade known as the Republican primary race. A veritable freak show. I weep for my country. My point is I’m not sure that ‘the lesser of two evils’ kind of appeal is going create a big Dem turnout.
It looks like the support for Inslee is a bit softer, so that even though the headline number is the same you’d have to give the edge to McKenna for now.
I do think it’s plausible that things could be trending towards Inslee even without any obvious news driving the change. I think the GOP primary process is raising awareness of the election year and reminding lots of people of why they usually don’t like Republicans. Also, the economy is slowly improving. Inslee has to really capitalize on this while he can, though. The local media are against him and McKenna’s undeserved reputation as a moderate is undermining Inslee’s base in King County where he needs to clean up to counter the rest of the state.
Yeah, I wouldn’t expect much of a coat tail effect when you’ve got an incumbent president who’s presided over 4 hard fought years.
@4
I’m not sure I understand your point. Could you elaborate?
Yay for the Republican Nut Machine! With Republicans like these, we don’t even need an election. We can appoint everybody by acclamation.
@1 And McKenna’s best chance is for the GOP Vote Suppression Machine to keep Democrats from voting, because GOPers can’t win an honest election and they know it. The only way they can win is the same way Putin does.
The Rich Got Richer
“A quarter century ago Forbes published our first annual list of the World’s Billionaires — and we found 140. This year the list broke records for the most number of billionaires (1,226) and combined net worth, at $4.6 trillion.”
And they didn’t get there by creating jobs. (Where are the jobs?) They did it by spending billions to manipulate captive political systems to stack the economic deck in their favor. The 1-percenters who caused the Great Recession got what they wanted: A large pool of unemployed cheap labor and booming corporate profits. Their next goal: Only wage earners pay taxes.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/46.....orbes_com/
Maybe we should only allow people who pay taxes on earned income to vote in national elections. That way the 1% crowd would never get to vote.
@8
Sad and true. But you forgot they also got rich by plundering, liquidating or destroying much of our national wealth (including but not limited to natural resources, good paying jobs, pension plans, clean air and water, biodiversity, open space, etc.) whatever they could get their fat greedy little hands on and turn into a fast buck, consequences to everyone else be damned. Next prize to plunder: the Social Security Trust Fund. The Dems’ hands will be just as dirty as the Republicans’.
It’s really hard for me to believe that Washington voters will go for Rob McKenna once they get to know Jay Inslee. On the other hand, I think the more voters get to know McKenna, the more his numbers will go down.
I am OK with that, because it would also keep the loser Occupy Wall Street types from voting too.
Heh. A lot of the occupiers are students or graduates with debt and little prospects of ever paying it off..
Typical right wing ideology – only those with the gold make the rules or have any say.
As for the one percent – they don’t have to vote – they can attempt to buy whatever outcome they want.
And that’s the whole point – no one should be allowed to do that – rich prick, pension fund, insurance company, union – anyone or anything.
For the mentally challenged among us (like the fool @ 12) that’s called “a level playing field”.
It would seem to me that the entities that make loans to students would do a better job of underwriting those loans. For example, is it better to loan money for school to someone whose career goal is to be a computer engineer or other technology career or to someone who plans to get a BA in French lit. The higher earning potential is for the computer engineer, not the French lit major. About all one can do with a degree in French lit is to be a barista at Starbucks and engage the customers in a lively conversation about the works of Camus. Not exactly a big income earner!
Let’s face it – doesn’t it make more sense to see what these kids plan to do with an education before we actually loan money out of trendy but fairly useless degrees? How many more sociology majors do we need, for Pete’s sake? I’d rather have a good HVAC guy!
@13,
I wouldn’t worry about the pension funds as bad actors. Sooner or later pensions will disappear as a retirement option. Defined contribution plans will be the only retirement plan available to the vast majority of workers. Pensions are already dropping like flies. It won’t be long before they’re practically extinct.
14
I still love lively conversations about Camus, and I speak very little French.
Ummmmm, so? Were they forced into the debt? No, it was their choice.
Sorry, but I have little to no sympathy for college students who pile up mountains of debt for a degree that gets them a $40k job. Not very smart if you ask me.
Just more people trying to skate away from a responsibility that they put onto themselves.
I suppose next time, after they buy a house or a car that they cant afford, that the debt should just be forgiven and they can keep the house or the car.
# 14: When I was in college (back in the bronze age, or so), we had NDSL (National Direct Student Loans). It was managed by the federal government, had subsidized loan rates which incurred 3% p/annum interest, which only began to accrue nine months after graduation. It was never a very big amount of a financial aid package, it wouldn’t pay for more than a portion of a state-college tuition bill. The rest had to be made up from a parent’s resources, a student’s private employment, or work-study. I worked every year I was in college, with the exception of my first year of graduate school. I was admitted to a pretty high-ranking private university for graduate school, but turned it down because I couldn’t afford it, even with student loans. I went to public universities instead. I finished grad school with a very small NDSL loan, all things considered – I think it was about $3,000 or so.
The NDSL agency never told us what schools or programs to attend, but since the loans were limited (in both time and amount), it helped serve as it’s own control mechanism. You had one shot to use it to get your degree, so you had better choose wisely. Most of those who were art or history majors were in those programs because they had a real talent for those subjects, and their parents were footing the bill.
What’s changed since then? Republicans couldn’t stand all that potential profit opportunities being lost to a government agency, and insisted that it be privatized. Interest rates were allowed to float to near market rates, and interest began incurring as soon as the loan installment was disbursed. But the amount being loaned skyrocketed, no questions were asked about how a student was going to be able to pay off a 100K loan after graduation. Instead, the lender got special deference in bankruptcy proceedings, making it near impossible to discharge a student loan regardless of the circumstances. And, of course, they have other options available to have others make sure the loan is paid, including having school transcripts withheld, etc.
And if anybody thinks it got more efficient under private management, you are deluded. I’ve heard lots of complaints about disbursments not being made until several weeks after tuition was due, with no explanation given and no timeline promised. Students have often had to make the decision of whether to pay rent or tuition.
Some things just work better when government handles it, despite what you might hear from the right-wing propoganda machine.
@18,
With the incredible level of debt these kids are taking on to get a degree, they don’t seem to think much about their choice of degrees as far as earning potential goes. It’s their career earnings that re-pay the debt.
If I was in the business of making loans to students, I’d be inclined to loan funds only to those students with good, solid career plans in fields where there are demands for their educations. If a student wants to major in art history or theater, then he or she should have to fund that education without loans from the private or the public sector.
Let’s face it, we’re not doing anyone any good to finance his or her degree in underwater watch-winding if there are no demands for degrees in those areas. I think, somewhere along the line, the idea of having a piece of paper from an institution of higher learing was the goal, not getting a valuable education is marketable potential and earning power.
# 19: Well, to some extent we get into the argument concerning the value of a generic college degree. I hesitate to get to far into that argument, because we end up talking about generalities and extreme cases, with little reliable statistics to assist us.
Personally, I think most college degrees are helpful in life, because they usually (but not always) produce a more disciplined thought process in students. Obviously, this is more true in some courses of studies than others, but at the very least they do show that a student has the ability to perservere long enough to accomplish a long-term goal.
In my own company, they require a college degree as a condition of employment. Someone could probably challenge that on ECC grounds, but they haven’t so far. The degree itself is irrelevent. I’ve got a B.A. and an advanced graduate degree, but they are largly irrelevent to the work I do. Others in my office have degrees in everything from a B.A. with a major in Russian, to English literature to micro-biology, and they don’t use those areas of study in their work.
In my first day of graduate school, the professer said: “I suppose you are wondering how your undergraduate degree will prepare you for this program. In short, it doesn’t. We just wanted to make sure you were four years older before you began this program”.
As far as the ability of any particular degree to guarantee a return on investment, I’ve seen quite a few examples of programs which made sense at the time the student started his/her degree, but which became useless thereafter. My own father was an engineer who started out in aerospace but went into nuclear engineering (and received a masters degree in the subject) because it seemed more stable at the time – in the early 1960’s. Of course, by 1979 nuclear engineers were lucky to find jobs flipping hamburgers (although he had died before this happened).
Even technical college programs can be a big problem. Some of the private technical colleges advertising heavily on TV have a lousy placement success rate, and not necessarily in anything close to the fields the students were trained for. Those of us old enough to remember the vocational college programs to re-train workers (such as out-of-work loggers) in the “high-demand field of VCR repair) might chuckle a bit.
Over the past four decades of experience I’ve learned that NO degree is a guarantee of a profitable job market. I’m not sure we really want either private or government lenders to be making those decisions for us. If you’ve ever tried to argue with an insurance company over a pre-determination of benefits for a medical or dental procedure, you will understand the problems which might be raised by such a policy.