As I do pretty much every day, I was looking at
Pollster.com,
Polling Report, and
Rasmussen, trying to find out new information on the state of the 2006 elections. I came to wondering if the Senate outlook would appear different if I looked only at polls from the last month, rather than the last five polls from every election. After all, some campaigns are polled much more frequently than others, so a hard- five-poll average is not measuring the same time period for all campaigns. Using all polls taken within the past 31 days in each campaign, here is what I came up with (arranged by tier):
- WA-Sen: Cantwell 51%, McGavick 40%
- MI-Sen: Stabenow 50%, Bouchard 40%
- PA-Sen: Casey 49%, Santorum 39%
- MN-Sen: Klobuchar 49%, Kennedy 41%
- OH-Sen: Brown 46%, DeWine 40%
- RI-Sen: Whitehouse 43%, Chafee 43%
- MD-Sen: Not enough information
- MT-Sen: Not enough information
- TN-Sen: Corker 45%, Ford 44%
- NJ-Sen: Kean 43%, Menendez 41%
- VA-Sen: Allen 47%, Webb 44%
- MO-Sen: Talent 48%, McCaskill 45%
- AZ-Sen: Kyl 49%, Pederson 38%
Montana and Maryland each only have one poll in the last month, so I didn't feel as though I could reasonably include them in this picture. The overall lesson, however, is that with few exception, looking at polls from the last month and looking at five-poll averages produces nearly identical snapshots of each race. Tennessee and Virginia and a little better for our side, while New Jersey is a little worse.
The tiers in the Senate race are also much easier to see when the numbers are laid out like this. In the "likely Dem" category, Washington and Michigan look very good for us, because we have both large polls leads and large cash leads (although in Washington McGavick can self-finance). While the polls look good in Pennsylvania and Ohio (the "lean Dem" category), those are a step below Washington and Michigan because Casey and Brown both trail in cash (and because both Ohio and Pennsylvania are generally more purple than the other two states). Rhode Island stay lean Dem because Chafee could lose the primary, and Minnesota is somewhere between the WA / MI tier and the PA / OH tier because the cash race there is generally tied. In Tennessee and New Jersey (the "toss-up" category), the polls are not great but the money situation is pretty good. Virginia and Missouri lag behind ("lean Republican") because Republicans have slight poll leads and large cash leads in both states. Arizona brings up the rear, and is functionally a mirror of Washington: a challenger way down in polls and cash but with the ability to self-finance.
Clearly, in order a lot of things would have to go in our favor in order to take the Senate. If I were placing ad buys for the DSCC, my first reaction would be to attack around the edges, hitting hardest in the races that we could quickly take out of play (PA, MN, MD) the race we could quickly put into surprising contention (VA), and the cheapest race (MT). Especially if Laffey wins the primary in RI, I think that combination could cause the most immediate problems for Republicans, leaving them only with their so-called "firewall" of TN, OH and MO in order to keep the Senate (plus New Jersey). The faster we can force them into a narrow campaign for the Senate in a small number of expensive states, the easier it becomes for our fifty-state strategy to swamp Republicans in non-Senate races outside of the "firewall." The less national their campaign becomes, the bigger our wave can potentially be.
