2014 battle for control of the US Senate

And what U.S. Senators do you consider "crazy."

"Sen. Hagan has failed the people of North Carolina and the nation by not securing our border," Tillis said during an Oct. 7 debate with Hagan. "Ladies and gentlemen, we have an Ebola outbreak, we have bad actors who can come across the border. We need to seal the border and secure it." Thom Tillis

"Groups like the Islamic State collaborate with drug cartels in Mexico who have clearly shown they’re willing to expand outside the drug trade into human trafficking and potentially even terrorism," Cotton said at a recent town hall-style gathering. “They could infiltrate our defenseless border and attack us right here in places like Arkansas. This is an urgent problem and it’s time we got serious about it, and I’ll be serious about it in the United States Senate.” Tom Cotton

Alabama Republican Senator Jeff Sessions accused President Obama, Attorney General Holder, and Vice President Biden of “deliberately collapsing” the nation’s immigration law enforcement system. This is pure John Birch Society paranoia:

"Our law enforcement system is in a state of collapse, and it’s a deliberate plan by the president of the United States, and it’s wrong. And, people need to be aware of it and need to stand up to it and I believe the American people are beginning to do so."

"I do think that yes, he should face those repercussions, and whether that's removal from office, whether that's impeachment," Ernst said in response.

Joni Ernst went on to say that as a U.S. Senator it's important not to be "silent" on actions that warranted Obama's impeachment.

"And unfortunately we have a number of legislators right now that simply let these things happen. They're not speaking up against these actions," Ernst said. "They're not speaking out against the president when he oversteps his bounds, when he makes those appointments, when he's appointing czars, when he is producing executive orders in a threat to a Congress that won't do as he wishes. So he has become a dictator."
 
The canvas data may move things a fraction in either direction. The essential point remains. The pollsters did a horrible job...and were heavily biased against the GOP. Here are the actual numbers.


I just did an analysis. Every key battleground States were off....most big....and all but one were heavily biased against the GOP.


Don't let anyone one spin you....The Pollsters screwed up. This is exactly how far off they were.



KS -11.5 off.

AR -10.0 off

VA -9.1 off

AK -1.3 off

IA -6.2 off

CO -1.7 off

KY -8.2 off

NC -2.4 off

GA -4.9 off

LA -4.5 off

NH +3.0 off This is the only State that had a GOP polling bias of the key States.


Of the key States listed....The aggregate polling bias was -5.4% against the GOP.

A huge failure and will need to be explained.
 
Polling is an inexact exercise.

Especially when enough registered voters start filling pollsters with shit to the extent that their baby blues turn brown.

Yes, there was one hell of a lot of intentional misleading.
 
Polling is an inexact exercise.

Especially when enough registered voters start filling pollsters with shit to the extent that their baby blues turn brown.

Yes, there was one hell of a lot of intentional misleading.

I'm skeptical if there was intentional misleading, just like there wasn't in 2012 when the bias was the other way.

I'd say the problem lies more with the polling firms themselves. Either there's some internal conformity problem where the media wants to portray a "close election" and the polling firms get intimidated to stand out and they all go along with the story showing an election closer then it is, or political polling in general just isn't up to speed in US for the modern age (cell phones, much lower response rates then a few decades ago, etc)
 
Geez, looking over these numbers the polls look like they were WAAAY off...Iowa polling for Senate was downright terrible, same with Kentucky and Arkansas. The Virginia race was polled really bad too.

I don't think I've ever seen polling this bad, what a failure
 
I'm skeptical if there was intentional misleading, just like there wasn't in 2012 when the bias was the other way.

I'd say the problem lies more with the polling firms themselves. Either there's some internal conformity problem where the media wants to portray a "close election" and the polling firms get intimidated to stand out and they all go along with the story showing an election closer then it is, or political polling in general just isn't up to speed in US for the modern age (cell phones, much lower response rates then a few decades ago, etc)


Had all polling firms in 2012 accepted the PARTISAN SELF-IDENTIFICATION of the voters, their results would have been more accurate. Same thing for 2014. The problem appears to be the modeling that most all firms used.

A reminder: many of the margins were off. But 8 of 10 aggregates for the marquee races in the Senate still correctly pointed toward the winner. And one of the two aggregates that was off (NC) was off by 2.8 (currently), which is well within the MoE. That being said, off still means off, only, in a closely contested race, one can almost forgive this one. The one aggregate that showed a statistical tie but pointing toward the Independent and the margins were way off was: KANSAS

So, when we are talking about firms being off, we are now talking about the actual calls, we are talking about the margins. And we are not talking at all about the 26 "safe" Senate races that also happened, nor are we talking about the polling for the 435 HOR races that happened. However, the marquee races are the ones where we measure voter intensity, and rightfully so.

But just a foretastes of how my analysis will be in about 3 months:

NC, PPP (D), final poll: Tillis +2
Current end result, NC: Tillis +1.7
PPP = bullseye

NH, UMass and Boston/Suffolk polls: Shaheen +3 (but these polls are just outside the 7 day timeframe and were not in the end-polling aggregate)
NH, PPP (D) final poll: Shaheen +2
Current end-result: Shaheen +3.1
UMass and Suffolk = bullseyes
PPP = off to the RIGHT by 1. Close to a bullseye, but no bullseye
PPP came the closest of all the end-polls.

AR, The Arkansas Poll: Cotton +13
AR: PPP (D): Cotton +8
Actual margin at current: Cotton +17
Even the best poll, from a hometown pollster, was off by 4 points to the LEFT. And that was the best pollster. PPP, the second best pollster of the end-polls, was off by 9 points. That is inacceptable. What a mess.

KS, PPP (D), final poll: Orman +1
Actual result (current stats): Roberts +10.4
PPP (D) was off by 10.4. That is absolutely inacceptable.
Of the 5 end polls, according to the strict time frame of 7 days (this is the usual method), not a single one got closer than 9.4 points away from the truth. They were ALL off.

I just quoted PPP (D) four times to show that even a very good, solid pollster like PPP, which nailed 11 of 12 battlegrounds in 2012 and 22 of 23 states overall in 2012, had at least one bullseye, was off to the Right by a little and in at least one poll, was off to the LEFT by a lot in at least two polls, and I mean, a lot.

We will discover that for this cycle, even some of the best hometown pollsters were off. Not all, but some.

This is going to be a fun one to analyse.
 
How many voters actually voted?

NC had a record high midterm turnout while NJ had a record low.

Does anyone have any actual figures because I am having a hard time finding any.
 
Hard to believe that polls were so far off to the point of being useless

There was no catastrophic event right before the election that would cause voters to run towards the Republicans. In fact, the Ebola and ISIS scares died down and economic reports were very good

Races that were identified as too close to call for months turned out to be landslides once the votes were cast. I can accept some voter remorse once they enter the booth, but a widespread jump to the right in EVERY race at every level is hard to understand

The pollsters need to rexamine their methodology. Their predictions are no more reliable than Dick Morris'
 
Hard to believe that polls were so far off to the point of being useless

There was no catastrophic event right before the election that would cause voters to run towards the Republicans. In fact, the Ebola and ISIS scares died down and economic reports were very good

Races that were identified as too close to call for months turned out to be landslides once the votes were cast. I can accept some voter remorse once they enter the booth, but a widespread jump to the right in EVERY race at every level is hard to understand

The pollsters need to rexamine their methodology. Their predictions are no more reliable than Dick Morris'

or that dipshit Karl Rove

-Geaux
 
Hard to believe that polls were so far off to the point of being useless

There was no catastrophic event right before the election that would cause voters to run towards the Republicans. In fact, the Ebola and ISIS scares died down and economic reports were very good

Races that were identified as too close to call for months turned out to be landslides once the votes were cast. I can accept some voter remorse once they enter the booth, but a widespread jump to the right in EVERY race at every level is hard to understand

The pollsters need to rexamine their methodology. Their predictions are no more reliable than Dick Morris'

I think that there may be an answer in here somewhere.

Democrats word of warning Page 17 US Message Board - Political Discussion Forum

Goodbye to All That Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult

"Over the last four decades, the Republican Party has transformed from a loyal opposition into an insurrectionary party that flouts the law when it is in the majority and threatens disorder when it is the minority. It is the party of Watergate and Iran-Contra, but also of the government shutdown in 1995 and the impeachment trial of 1999. If there is an earlier American precedent for today's Republican Party, it is the antebellum Southern Democrats of John Calhoun who threatened to nullify, or disregard, federal legislation they objected to and who later led the fight to secede from the union over slavery."

A couple of years ago, a Republican committee staff director told me candidly (and proudly) what the method was to all this obstruction and disruption. Should Republicans succeed in obstructing the Senate from doing its job, it would further lower Congress's generic favorability rating among the American people. By sabotaging the reputation of an institution of government, the party that is programmatically against government would come out the relative winner.

A deeply cynical tactic, to be sure, but a psychologically insightful one that plays on the weaknesses both of the voting public and the news media. There are tens of millions of low-information voters who hardly know which party controls which branch of government, let alone which party is pursuing a particular legislative tactic. These voters' confusion over who did what allows them to form the conclusion that "they are all crooks," and that "government is no good," further leading them to think, "a plague on both your houses" and "the parties are like two kids in a school yard." This ill-informed public cynicism, in its turn, further intensifies the long-term decline in public trust in government that has been taking place since the early 1960s - a distrust that has been stoked by Republican rhetoric at every turn ("Government is the problem," declared Ronald Reagan in 1980).
 
No mystery here; the Democratic Party needs to go back to its traditional roots as a liberal Party, and leave off the race-baiting and sociopathic identity politics that serves no one except the personal pseudo-intellectual and infantile emotional needs of BoBoes who are pretty much clueless about everything outside their little bubbles. A nice run-down of their problems is in this little essay.

The Neo-Liberal War on Blue-Collar Whites and the Breakup of the Democratic Party NO QUARTER USA NET

Chris Bowers, Obama supporter and writer at Open Left, dreams of a cultural change in an Obama Democratic Party which is almost a parody of the brie and Chardonnay stereotype:
There should be a major cultural shift in the party, where the southern Dems and Liebercrat elite will be largely replaced by rising creative class types. Obama has all the markers of a creative class background, from his community organizing, to his Unitarianism, to being an academic, to living in Hyde Park to shopping at Whole Foods and drinking PBR. These will be the type of people running the Democratic Party now, and it will be a big cultural shift from the white working class focus of earlier decades.

Further illustrating their break with traditional liberalism, Markos Moulitsas has declared himself a libertarian Democrat, in other words: a politically correct Republican. These neo-liberals are really proposing a Party run by those who have little need for government and instead focus on identity politics, environmentalism, post-partisan government, and the rejection of American exceptionalism. The neo-liberals demonize the traditional Democratic base of poor white voters precisely because these voters rely on government and expect their leadership to fight partisan battles on their behalf. They are also deeply patriotic and weary of the moral relativism put forward by the likes of Jeremiah Wright.

...

The class warfare now raging in the Democratic Party, while both sides ostensibly are on the Left, is actually the classic struggle between the proletariat workers (blue-collar whites and Latinos) and the petite bourgeoisie (neo-liberals). African Americans have mostly gone to Obama because of the historic nature of his candidacy; many, however, were pushed to Obama by the race-baiting wedge utilized by Obama and the neo-liberals, a tactic identical in form and result as that used by Lee Atwater and other Republican operatives. Obama’s hostility towards the white working class, as seen with his bitter-gate remarks, is the exact framework from which many of the neo-liberals view this struggle:

Obama’s dismissal of white working people represents a sea-change in the Democrats’ basic identity as the workingman’s party – one that has been coming since the late 1960s, when large portions of the Left began regarding white workers as hopeless and hateful reactionaries.

Arthur Schlesinger, eminent historian and New Frontiersman, foresaw the dangers of identity politics as a substitute for progressive policy. He believed in an activist government which should be used “to improve opportunities and to enlarge freedoms for ordinary people.” The Obama campaign’s desire to win the nomination, regardless of its illegitimacy, and their hostility towards poor white Americans is a movement which is tearing the Democratic Party apart. Many of us believe that the best way to fight for working Americans — regardless of color — is to make sure this movement is defeated.
 
Derideo_Te WelfareQueen

The preliminary totals for the 36 senatorial races in 34 states are coming through at uselectionatlas (dot) org.
Dave Leip does excellent work at getting the figures in as quickly as possible and also, updating them. I often helped him per email in 2008 and 2012 to know when updates were available, due to the time zone difference between the BRD and the East Coast of the USA.

The 2014 figures are just preliminary figures and of course, do not cover all 50 states, but they are useful to compare the battle for the Senate, 2014 over 2010:

uselectionatlas-US Senate preliminary.png


Right now, some 42.6 million votes have been tallied. But we are not at the end of counting, not by a longshot.


Here's a comparative table to former Senatorials. I have made a green-box to show the GOP winning margins since the 1990s:

uselectionatlas-US Senate preliminary  comparison.png


Don't let the colors fool you. Dave Leip at uselectionatlas uses reverse colors for the parties. At his statistics site, blue = GOP, red = DEM.

Right now, the GOP margin is +4.87%. In 2010, it was +5.53% and in 1994, also a massive wave year, it was +5.90%. Now, that +4.87% margin is bound to change, it is only preliminary. And also, the raw vote total will change. In 2010, the end total was 66.6 million (big senatorial in Californiaand Florida that year, don't forget), the current tally is 20 million under that total, so I am pretty sure that that raw-vote total is bound to rise considerably. Which is why, WelfareQueen , I wait patiently until the final canvasses are in to make any permanent comparisons. But we can all see that the GOP needs less of a margin to make a big dent in the Senate. In 2006, the DEM margin in the Senate was a landslide +11.52% and yet, the DEMS captured only 6 seats, and two of them just barely. To pick up six seats in 2010, the GOP only needed a +5.53 margin, a little less than 1/2 of the Democratic margin from four years before. Sometimes, it's great strategy, sometimes it's kismet, sometimes it a little bit of everything.

On to the gubernatorial numbers:

uselectionatlas-gubernatorial preliminary.png


In the gubernatorial, 60.8 million votes have already been tallied.

And, as I did with the senatorials, here, a comparison:

uselectionatlas-gubernatorial comparison.png



Currently, the GOP is at +5.39% over the DEMS, a statistic that is only about 1/2 point larger than the current senatorial statistic, so we are seeing consistency across the board. In 2010, here in the gubernatorials, the DEMS actually won, by +0.73%. How is this possible? California, New York and Illinois were in the gubernatorial picture And those DEM gub races, where they won, were big wins for them.

In 2010, 70.8 million votes were cast in the gubernatorials and so, right now, we are 10 million under that total. This raw count is also likely to grow over the next 6 weeks as well. Only, most of the states with gubernatorials this time around were many of the smaller states (breadbasket, plains states), and they tend to get their results in earlier than the massive states. So, whether the gubernatorial totals will hit 70.8 million, I am not so sure.

I have no stats yet on all 435 House races, that is a total pain in that ass to double check, noting again, until the final canvasses are in.

But these two preliminary sets of totals might be of help to both of you fine gentlemen.

I will update this set of data in two weeks from now. It will be interesting to see what has changed in the meantime.
 
Last edited:
Hard to believe that polls were so far off to the point of being useless

There was no catastrophic event right before the election that would cause voters to run towards the Republicans. In fact, the Ebola and ISIS scares died down and economic reports were very good

Races that were identified as too close to call for months turned out to be landslides once the votes were cast. I can accept some voter remorse once they enter the booth, but a widespread jump to the right in EVERY race at every level is hard to understand

The pollsters need to rexamine their methodology. Their predictions are no more reliable than Dick Morris'
Democrats ran away plain and simple. They treated Pres Obama like he was GW Bush and didn't ask him for help or could barely speak his name. They ran to the Clintons looking for help instead. The could have ran on some positive issues but instead chose to run on womens issues and the Koch brothers. Losing issues for any male or millennial voters. Independents like the ones in my family want to hear about issues, not crap. It was the democrats to lose and they chose to go on the defense and not the offense. Republicans said they would try to do something about the mandates, tax reform, Keystone pipeline and getting rid of the medical device tax. Americans mostly can agree there and they voted accordingly. The democrat in me says that the left cant keep going after the millennial vote when they are still in debt and living home with mom and dad. If they want them to vote in midterms they need to get them into good jobs and homes where they care who is on the ballot for dog catcher and mayor. Now given all that, the GOP must do something, not sit on their laurels.
 
Derideo_Te WelfareQueen

The preliminary totals for the 36 senatorial races in 34 states are coming through at uselectionatlas (dot) org.
Dave Leip does excellent work at getting the figures in as quickly as possible and also, updating them. I often helped him per email in 2008 and 2012 to know when updates were available, due to the time zone difference between the BRD and the East Coast of the USA.

The 2014 figures are just preliminary figures and of course, do not cover all 50 states, but they are useful to compare the battle for the Senate, 2014 over 2010:

View attachment 33883

Right now, some 42.6 million votes have been tallied. But we are not at the end of counting, not by a longshot.


Here's a comparative table to former Senatorials. I have made a green-box to show the GOP winning margins since the 1990s:

View attachment 33884

Don't let the colors fool you. Dave Leip at uselectionatlas uses reverse colors for the parties. At his statistics site, blue = GOP, red = DEM.

Right now, the GOP margin is +4.87%. In 2010, it was +5.53% and in 1994, also a massive wave year, it was +5.90%. Now, that +4.87% margin is bound to change, it is only preliminary. And also, the raw vote total will change. In 2010, the end total was 66.6 million (big senatorial in Californiaand Florida that year, don't forget), the current tally is 20 million under that total, so I am pretty sure that that raw-vote total is bound to rise considerably. Which is why, WelfareQueen , I wait patiently until the final canvasses are in to make any permanent comparisons. But we can all see that the GOP needs less of a margin to make a big dent in the Senate. In 2006, the DEM margin in the Senate was a landslide +11.52% and yet, the DEMS captured only 6 seats, and two of them just barely. To pick up six seats in 2010, the GOP only needed a +5.53 margin, a little less than 1/2 of the Democratic margin from four years before. Sometimes, it's great strategy, sometimes it's kismet, sometimes it a little bit of everything.

On to the gubernatorial numbers:

View attachment 33885

In the gubernatorial, 60.8 million votes have already been tallied.

And, as I did with the senatorials, here, a comparison:

View attachment 33886


Currently, the GOP is at +5.39% over the DEMS, a statistic that is only about 1/2 point larger than the current senatorial statistic, so we are seeing consistency across the board. In 2010, here in the gubernatorials, the DEMS actually won, by +0.73%. How is this possible? California, New York and Illinois were in the gubernatorial picture And those DEM gub races, where they won, were big wins for them.

In 2010, 70.8 million votes were cast in the gubernatorials and so, right now, we are 10 million under that total. This raw count is also likely to grow over the next 6 weeks as well. Only, most of the states with gubernatorials this time around were many of the smaller states (breadbasket, plains states), and they tend to get their results in earlier than the massive states. So, whether the gubernatorial totals will hit 70.8 million, I am not so sure.

I have no stats yet on all 435 House races, that is a total pain in that ass to double check, noting again, until the final canvasses are in.

But these two preliminary sets of totals might be of help to both of you fine gentlemen.

I will update this set of data in two weeks from now. It will be interesting to see what has changed in the meantime.

Thanks, Stat. :)

The House races are most likely to give us the best total of voters nationwide because they are the only national elections in the off years. Comparing them to prior off years will be an indication of whether we had more or less turnout. My own inclination is to go with less because there wasn't the same motivation as there was in 2010 and 2006.
 

New Topics

Forum List

Back
Top