Monday, April 12, 2010

And the finalists are...

Arizona: Pretty much no one except Rasmussen is polling Arizona and with the amount of stuff going on in the state- the Hayworth/McCain primary, a rare opportunity in the Governor's race for Democrats to pick up something they currently don't have this year- it would be worth getting another set of eyes on it.

Louisiana: Along with Richard Burr, David Vitter should be the most endangered Republican incumbent. Is he really in any trouble? Recent polling has told divergent stories.

New Hampshire: We haven't looked at this race since last February, one of the few major Senate contests for which that's the case. New Hampshire's a state where you can do the House races on a statewide poll as well.

Pennsylvania 12: The race to replace John Murtha has much broader implications for this fall than what's going on in Hawaii.

Washington: This is a good old 'divergent polls' state. Rasmussen says Murray's in trouble. Research 2000 says not so much. I'd be interested to see where we fall on that spectrum.

Voting is open until Thursday morning, and we'll do the top two vote getters.

24 comments:

  1. Tom Jensen,

    Why couldn't you bring yourself to poll the IN Republican Primary. There hasn't come out ONE SINGLE POLL for this Race.

    I doubt Coats has this wrapped up.

    We need a Poll here with 3 weeks to go.

    Hope you doing one after this week.

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  2. Tom, please tell me, did you already or will you in the future anyway poll Indiana? I was sure that you will put it up for a vote because at least about 40% of the comments were recommending Indiana GOP primary and general election

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  3. All of these are really great picks. I think New Hampshire would be the most interesting because we haven't seen much polling on its two competitive House races or GOP Senate primary. Also Ras has Gov. Lynch polling relatively low- its worth seeing if he's potentially vulnerable in this poll too.

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  4. My vote New Hampshire.

    Murray polled ahead of Rossi in the most recent Rasmussen poll and Moore didn't release the results of their early April poll which makes me think it didn't look too good for Rossi either. I don't expect Rossi to get in the race but I like the fact that his dithering is depressing fundraising for the other Rs while Murray sets fundraising records:)
    I won't really be interested in another WA poll until summer.

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  5. NH should win hands down! A gold mine! 2 highly competitive congressional races (Shea Porter's race is rated as a toss up because she is a few notches too liberal for this swing district and how's Former Rep Bass' comeback in the 2nd doing?) and primaries, Governor's race, senate race, presidential primary data (which will probably be useless).

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  6. Why are you guys refusing to poll California. No one is taking the threat of Boxer being unseated seriously. I begged you guys to poll Massachusetts from September through January. You guys REFUSED. Then waited till the last minute to release a poll that set off a bad chain reaction in Massachusetts and cost us Teddy Kennedy's seat. If same thing happens to Boxer, I WILL BLAME PPP.

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  7. arizona! arizona! arizona! arizona!

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  8. I glad PPP take in consideration AZ-Gov and NH-Sen races. And better still if NH-01 and NH-02 are included in the poll.

    About Louisiana would be much more interesting see LA-02. I think that would be more interesting than PA-12. Pro-republican pollsters give advantage to Critz (D).

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  9. Is this a blog, Tom? why can't you get yourself to answer commenters questions even when they're few? Why didn't you even put up IN for a vote?

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  10. The ignorance of the anonymous comment at 8:25 is earth shattering. Blame a polling firm for a bad national environment and a poorly run campaign? Get a grip. How about Boxer worrying about Boxer's getting reelected and let her poll her own race? You can't blame Coakley's loss on a spate of bad polls that came out at the end of the campaign. If the polls were bad, she's the one who got herself to that position in the first place (along with a healthy dose of national backlash).

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  11. There are legal issues involved with polling Indiana that I don't care to mess around with. That's why you see so little polling of the state.

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  12. Tom, Please would you bother explaining the legal issues. Many readers including me would be interested. Thanks

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  13. The comment at 8:54 am is just plain stupid. Do not tell me, that had PPP maybe done one poll in September, October, November, or may early December, the mess in Massachusetts wouldn't have been avoided. I kept asking and asking and asking and asking and they refused. I'm so sick of everyone blaming Coakley for this mess. Part of being a democratic polling firm is to help democratic candidates. I'm getting sick of all these dumb polltopias. There should have at least been one poll in September and one poll in December done in Massachusetts from PPP and I can gurantee you that if that had been done there would be a senator Coakley. Everyone was to blame in what happened in Massachusetts not just Coakley camp.

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  14. I will gladly tell you that you have no idea whether "the mess" would have been avoided had PPP polled every month or not. You don't know whether they would have taken an outside polling firm's polls seriously. You don't even know what those polls would have found. Thus, I'm hardpressed to understand your drama queen attitude about equating your hypothetical situation to reality. Ultimately, campaigns are responsible for their own polling and their own fates. If they had wanted their race polled every month, maybe they should have hired their own polling firm or paid PPP to do it. If I recall, Coakley said herself that they did not take the campaign seriously enough after the primary win, and that's no one's fault but her own and her campaign staff's. PPP asks us what they should poll, which amazes me, so maybe you should be condemning other readers whom you evidently failed to convince and not shifting the blame to PPP?

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  15. @ Anonymous @10:34 AM

    IIRC, Indiana bans "robo-polling", so you unfortunately you will never see a PPP poll of the state. (Nor any other pollsters that do not use live interviewers.)

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  16. If you guys do New Hampshire then I don't think the Senate race will be of any interest. NH-01 and NH-02 are the important ones and the governor's looks possibly competititve.

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  17. All of the above won't work will it? I would like to see PA-12.

    Washington state would be my second choice. AZ is covered by one of the best (along with you guys) so while I would like a second opinion, it is not as important as the PA-12 where we are blind.

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  18. I don't know what your problem is but I do have every right to have PPP share some of the blame for the Massachusetts mess. Every month since Kennedy died, I asked PPP to poll Massachusetts. They refused. As a democratic pollster, PPP is supposed to help democratic candidates. Rasmussen has no problem doing what ever is in the best interest of their republican candidates sometimes PPP needs to do the same. I'm not saying Coakley is blameless but her actions and the actions of her campaign only account for 50% of the blame. On December 8th when Coakley won the primary everyone from Stu Rothenberg to the most staunch conservatives said hell would have to freeze over before Massachusetts would go red. I hold a firm belief that had PPP done a poll the week of December 8th, they would have seen that Brown had the potential competitive with their state of the art IVR polling. Then Coakley would have campaigned like crazy and would have probably won at least 10 points. Instead, no one polled this race until it was practically over. What do you expect to happen?! I think I have made a very good point and I'm sick of you people who think you know everything just blaming the candidate when ever you they lose an election. This mess was avoidable.

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  19. Yawn. My problem is unnecessarily dramatic blogger grandstanding, finger pointing, and hand waving. You want to hold PPP personally responsible? Good for you. Sane people will just be sitting here laughing at your hysteria. Yes, I know, if we listened to your sage advice (and if PPP listened every time you personally demanded a poll), Democrats would be winning both of those Idaho Senate seats... all 435 House seats... global warming would never have happened... Lincoln would never have been assassinated... etc. etc.

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  20. Does the commentator who says ppp is Responsible for coakley losing know that:
    at the beginning of the election on December 9, an internal had her up by 25 points ?
    On christmas day an internal had her up by 15? She thought her lead was insurmountable and decided to take a break.

    So she knew the trends from her internals. Do you discount Boxer's internals? And I suppose You didn't find that California is polled by Field, Rasmussen, and others regularly?

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  21. First of all in response to Bill, Coakley's pollster was Celinda lake who in my opinion is awful and rarely has accurate results. Second, PPP would have caught the problem with independents that other pollsters didn't. In addition, there never was a christmas internal done, that is a downright lie and her first internal did not have her leading by 25 points. Your information about Coakley's internals is grossley inaccurate. Next in response to the nasty comment at 6:08 am, it would not have killed PPP to have done one early poll in Massachusetts, PPP does IVR polls so doing a poll is as easy as pushing a button for them. You can keep spewing your BS if you want but I am not going to back down until PPP does ONE poll of Boxer vs. Campbell and that does not mean PPP doing coming out and doing a poll the week before the election showing Boxer down like what happened in Massachusetts. This mess was avoidable! Scott Brown had been pulling upsets his entire political career winning in a heavily democratic state senate district thus I was extremely concerned when I heard he was the R candidate. I wanted Jensen and Debnam's opinion of whether an upset would be possible but instead they took the easy way out and assumed Mass would go blue instead of conducting poll to evaluate that hypothesis. Asking for one Boxer vs. Campbell poll is not that much to ask either.

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  22. There is a difference between politely asking or suggesting that that PPP, a firm that to my knowledge was never hired by either Boxer or Coakley to poll for them and is therefore under no obligation to poll in those states, conduct a poll in CA and the kind of eleven-year-old grandstanding in your original post. Do you honestly believe that Boxer is too stupid to poll her own race? She's not exactly a landslide winner and is not that popular, and never has been. I'm sure she's on top of things, so your desire to hold PPP personally responsible for her plausible demise just isn't logical. Go back to your original post. That's what you said. If Coakley didn't bother to poll her own race in which she was the nominee when the Republicans were throwing the kitchen sink at her, well, maybe the brightest person won that election and MA is better off?

    You also incredibly stretch your credibility to give PPP any blame for MA. They were never hired by the Coakley campaign or any other entity to poll the state. You just don't seem to get that. You claim they have some moral obligation to poll MA as a Democratic polling firm. By that logic, they have a moral obligation to poll every race for every Democrat since their polls are apparently "communal goods," from your perspective. Then you come on here and basically say that had the world listened to YOU the Democrats would have their sixty seats. There's no point to your hand-wringing. You're running on nothing but pure presumption. If PPP had shown Coakley comfortably ahead and she still lost, would you still blame them? When it comes down to it, if the polls at the end of that race showed her tied or losing, she let herself get there. No polling firm bears any responsibility for carrying her. Maybe she didn't have the appetite to cross the finish line? You really need to add a dose of logic and reality to your blaming, and come across as something other than just another howling blogger with an axe to grind.

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  23. From reading the news stories, that's what I remember about her internals. In fact, her campaign manager said that her 15 point lead shortly before Christmas was why she quit campaigning during those holiday weeks. When she returned, her lead had near evaporated.

    As a side note, rasmussen delivered a two point lead to boxer over Campbell yesterday. The state is polled so heavily unlike some of the others PPP is doing their surveys in. Also, do you think Boxer is so lazy she won't campaign? We all know her - she was the first democrat thus cycle to announce her reelection so she could get a headstart on fundraising in case the governor ran. She won't slag off like coakley.

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  24. The only people polling this race where Suffolk, and Celinda Lake. Two of the most innacurate pollsters in the business. In addition, the person who keeps shouting criticism at me for point out that PPP could have picked up the issue with independents or would have picked up that Mass was violently against the health care plan proposed by Obama. I have a right to share my opinion and if you feel the need to just rip on it to make yourself feel better than you have some serious problems. Upsets tend to happen the most in races that have the least public polls done in them. No matter what you say I will still hold to my belief that had PPP done one poll in December, Coakley would have won. It is simply a fact that there had been no IVR polls done of this race until two weeks before election day.

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