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From the Boston Herald...
Rattled Dems fret over health of Senate seat
It’s all about health care.
The race to replace Ted Kennedy in the U.S. Senate has come down to one issue, and it’s not Sen. Ted Kennedy’s “legacy.” It’s the misshapen health-care bills that have scared the bejesus out of an ever-growing majority of American voters, even in this bluest of states. Asked his view of the bill, the Republican candidate, state Sen. Scott Brown, says succinctly: “It kinda stinks.”
A month ago, he was 30 points behind his Democratic opponent, the don’t-make-no-waves attorney general, Martha Coakley. She was cruising, playing the one card she never leaves home without - the gender card. Then the specifics of ObamaCare started leaking out. The cuts in Medicare - $500 billion, or as Brown prefers to say, “half a trillion dollars.” Then the state’s union members began to hear about the president’s insistence on a 40 percent tax on their “Cadillac” health care plans.
Overnight, the old dichotomies, Democrat-Republican, red-blue, lost their resonance. This has become a struggle for self-preservation - medical and fiscal. As the old folk song goes, Which side are you on? “This race affects everyone - everyone,” Brown says over and over again. “Forget about the letter after my name. If I win, this broken health-care bill goes back to the drawing board.” Which is why the city was buzzing yesterday with unconfirmed reports that Barack Obama may have changed his mind about staying out of the race. The rumor was that he may fly into Boston this weekend on behalf of the flailing Coakley, whose lead in the latest poll has shrunk to two points. Coakley is still favored to win, but what Brown calls “the machine” is stunned. In the most recent Rasmussen poll, Brown leads Coakley among independents 71-23.
“They are in an absolute panic mode,” one prominent Bay State Democrat was saying yesterday. “They don’t care if bringing in Barack energizes the Republicans and independents - how much more energized can they get? Obama’s people have to get the minority vote out, and Coakley sure can’t do it herself. It’s risky, but it may be the only way now to save her.” The national Democrats are pumping hundreds of thousands of dollars into the race in the final days. On TV and radio here, Scott Brown’s first name is now “Republican,” as in “Republican Scott Brown.” The SEIU, moveon.org, NARAL - all the usual suspects are on board. The “A” word - abortion - is heard once more in the land. But Coakley’s first 30-second hit piece fell a bit flat when, at the end, the campaign misspelled the name of her state as “Massachusettes.” “Maybe Martha should talk to some people who actually live here,” Brown said yesterday. The deluge of attack ads began a couple of hours after the final debate Monday night, just after Coakley left the spin room. She’d turned in yet another lackluster performance, informing the audience that there were no terrorists left in Afghanistan, two days after one of the slain CIA operatives was buried in nearby Bolton, and on the same day that three U.S. servicemen were killed in the war that she seems to think is over.
But Brown won the debate when he fielded a question from the hyper-liberal moderator, David Gergen, who asked him how he could possibly vote to kill health care while sitting in Ted Kennedy’s seat. “With all due respect,” Brown told the Sunday chat-show fixture, “this is not Ted Kennedy’s seat, it’s not the Democrats’ seat, it’s the people’s seat.”
Brown was in the midst of an Internet “money bomb” fund-raiser, and after slapping down Gergen, by the end of the night he had raised $1.3 million - $800,000 above the campaign’s goal. In the state’s suburban town halls, voters are lining up to get absentee ballots, just in case the weather takes a turn for the worse Tuesday. For example, in Yarmouth, on the Cape, during the primary last month, 183 residents voted absentee. By Monday, the number of absentee ballots given out in Yarmouth was 543. It’s the same in all of the more conservative cities and towns.
Despite the bitter January cold, the Brown campaign has been swamped with volunteers. On the weekends, there are Brown “standouts” at every major intersection. Representing a gerrymandered, heavily Democrat district in the state Senate, Brown is used to having his yard signs disappear, but this time there’s a difference. “My own supporters are stealing them from each other,” he said. “They say, I need it more than you. I live on a busier street.”
The Democratic establishment is relying on yesterday’s tactics. On Tuesday night, a reporter for the Weekly Standard was assaulted outside a Coakley fundraiser in D.C. by a Democrat operative. The video was quickly posted on the Internet, but the Boston Globe, the Kennedy family house organ, pretended it was still 1973. Their headline: “Reporter takes stumble.” Just like Martha Coakley. She may yet hang on to win, but even she does, one thing is certain. As Scott Brown said, it’s not Ted Kennedy’s seat anymore.
Now from pollster.com
We have two new polls out in Massachusetts on the January 19 special election to fill Ted Kennedy's Senate seat, and their results could not be more different. The new survey conducted Saturday through Wednesday last week by the University of New Hampshire Survey Center on behalf of the Boston Globe shows Democrat Martha Coakley leading by 17 percentage points (53% to 36%), while a new automated poll conducted on Thursday and Friday by Public Policy Polling (PPP) shows a dead heat, with Brown one point ahead (48% to 47%). A third survey conducted on Monday by Rasmussen Reports has Coakley ahead by nine (50% to 41%).
The disparity of the results is likely to provoke the usual angst about inconsistent polls, debates about past pollster accuracy and the customary conspiracy theories about intentional bias. Forgive me if I don't join in, because as different as these results seem to be, I think the discrepancies actually add up to a consistent and important finding on the state of voter preferences this past week.
Here are three things to keep in mind about polls on the special election:
Turnout Will Matter -- The big spread in results among the polls, and differences apparent within two of them, are all consistent in supporting one finding: The lower the turnout, the better the odds for Scott Brown. These differences indicate that the voters most interested and most likely to vote are Republican, while Democrats are more blase.
Consider the differences in the table below from within Globe/UNH and Rasmussen surveys. Both show a dead even race among the most interested and certain voters, while Coakley leads by huge double-digit margins among all other voters.
Those differences mean the overall results reported by any poll are going to be very sensitive to the "tightness" of the screen or likely voter model used. The more restrictive the screen, the closer the result. My assumption is that the "if you do not intend to vote...please hang up" automated methodology employed by PPP produced an effectively tighter screen and, thus, a likely voter sample closer to the "certain" or "extremely interested" subgroups of the Boston Globe and Rasmussen polls.
Pollsters can't predict turnout - I have yet to see any poll or statistical model that can predict voter turnout with precision, especially in an oddly timed special election like the one in Massachusetts. What pollsters try to do is monitor self reported enthusiasm and interest as compared to previous, comparable contests and try to calibrate their screens and models appropriately (although there is much debate among pollsters about the accuracy of those calibrations and their necessity).
The bigger challenge in predicting turnout, however, has to do with something more fundamental: The size and makeup of the electorate will depend on decisions not yet made by those who may or may not vote on January 19. How many will become more interested and decide to vote over the next 9 days? I'm not sure any poll or methodology can predict that with confidence.
Keep in mind that as of this past week, most Massachusetts voters assumed that Coakley would win in a walk. According to Globe/UNH poll, nearly three quarters (74%) of Massachusetts voters believe Coakley will win, while only 11% say the same about Brown. In that sense, news of a narrowing race could work to Coakley's advantage if it convinces Democrats that their votes are needed and that Ted Kennedy's seat could be lost to the Republicans without their help.
Turnout differences complicate trend tracking - The big spread in these poll results complicates our ability to spot trends. For example, PPP's Tom Jensen last night noted that they fielded their poll on Thursday and Friday, while the Globe/UNH poll was fielded in the first part of last week (Saturday through Wednesday). The earlier start to the Globe poll, he wrote yesterday, "could make a diff[erence] when things are moving fast." That's true in theory but difficult to evaluate in this case because we have to assume we are comparing an apple (the Globe/UNH results) to an orange (PPP) in terms of their likely voter samples.
Now that we have more than five polls released for this race, we should have our tracking chart posted (along with the tracking table, probably later tonight), but be forewarned: The small number of polls and the big "house effects" among them mean that we will really need to limit ourselves to same-pollster comparisons to evaluate trends over the last week. Coakley lead by an average of 29 percentage points on three surveys conducted before the primary last year, but leads by an average of 8 point on the three surveys conducted this past week. So we will see narrowing of the margin between the trend lines on our chart. Has Brown continued to gain over the last week? To answer that questions, we will need o watch tracking polls conducted next week by the same pollsters in the field this week.
Do we have a clear picture today of who will win on January 19 and by how much? Probably not, but we do have a sense of the dynamics that will ultimately determine the outcome.
And one last thought for those covering and commenting on this race: please spare us the cliche about the outcome depending on which campaign's "troops" do the best job turning out their supporters. Field organizations can make a difference, especially when contests are close, but the discrepancies in enthusiasm we are seeing are unrelated to canvassing and phone banking. Conservative Republicans are angry and ready to walk on hot coals if necessary to register their discontent with the direction of government. If he enthusiasm gap narrows, it will be because Democrats come to believe that Martha Coakley shares their priorities, Scott Brown threatens those priorities and the outcome of the election is in doubt.
Update: Via Twitter, Alex Lundry notes that the Globe Poll tests independent Joseph L. Kennedy (no relation to the famous family), while the PPP poll does not. What's interesting about that is that the presence of a "Kennedy" on the ballot appears to cos Republican Brown more support than Democrat Coakley . Also, for what it's worth, roughly 90% of those who support "Kennedy" (4 of his 5 percentage points) have not yet "definitely decided on a candidate, and about the same number (90%) are voters that are less than "extremely interested" in the Senate race.
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