Florida was already the most heavily polled Senate race of the cycle even before this week (its main competition is Texas, which makes sense, since those are the two most-populous states with competitive races this year). But Sunday and Monday were a veritable bonanza of new Sunshine State polls, and the news was (mostly) good for Democratic incumbent Bill Nelson. Things started off with a poll released on Sunday by SRSS for CNN, which had Nelson leading Republican Rick Scott 50-45. (If that name seems unfamiliar, they’re CNN’s new pollster starting this year. CNN’s pollster for many years was ORC, whom CNN apparently let go because of their years of consistent pro-Sauron bias.)
“Wait a minute, that can’t be right,” said the pundits; this was a race that’s always been close and was, in their minds, always going to be close, so a 5-point lead for Nelson wouldn’t do. (Never mind the general tendency that undecided voters usually break against the party in power in the closing weeks of a midterm election.) But then on Monday morning, Quinnipiac came out with a poll giving Nelson a 52-46 lead, seeming to confirm CNN’s result.
By mid-day Monday, Scott seemed to realize he had a potential perception problem, that the media narrative might suddenly switch over to the possibility that the race was slipping away from him. He had an ace up his sleeve: he rolled out an internal poll taken for his campaign, by Republican pollster OnMessage, that had him leading Nelson 51-46. (With no mention of the fact that field dates … October 14th through 18th … mostly predated the Quinnipiac poll, putting it somewhat closer to the period immediately after the Kavanaugh confirmation when, in retrospect, Republican poll response rates seemed to spike.)
In a glorious moment of karmic retribution, though, at the end of the day on Monday, SurveyUSA on behalf of a local TV channel, then whipped out one final poll. This one gave Nelson his biggest lead of any poll of the race taken since June, putting him ahead of Scott 49-41.
There’s one caveat if you look closely at the table below, though; you’ll notice that our rolling poll average still has Nelson leading Scott by a less-impressive 47-46 lead, only slightly better than the tie in that race one week ago. Scott’s internal had its desired effect, counteracting the Quinnipiac poll in aggregators’ averages. I’d advise you to check again tomorrow though and you’ll be more pleased: that SurveyUSA poll dropped after the close of business on Monday, so it’s at the top of the stack of polls to be added to the model on Tuesday.
In fact, if you look closely at the full list of Florida polls, you’ll start to notice a pattern that matches the latest batch of polls: the polls from the national, “gold standard” pollsters … ones like Quinnipiac or PPP, or ones who poll in a number of different states, working for national media organizations (like Marist) or local news media (Mason-Dixon) … are the ones who tend to find Nelson with the lead. The polls that show Scott in the lead tend to be either a) internal polls for Republican organizations or b) local universities that don’t have a track record in polling other states (or even a long track record in polling Florida).
You might think “well, if they’re local universities, they at least know a lot about how to poll Florida,” but even that’s not the case … a lot of these are cheaply-done polls done to capitalize on the PR value of having your name on polls. A lot of educational institutions are seemingly now aspiring to be the next Quinnipiac (a school that’s seen its enrollment go up dramatically thanks to having its named plastered on the news every day), just without doing the hard work of slowly and methodically building up a high-quality polling operation.
There’s one other state where I’m seeing a similar tendency, and that’s the one state (other than North Dakota, which isn't looking very salvageable) where the polling average finds a Democratic incumbent in rougher shape than Nelson: Missouri, where our current average finds Claire McCaskill trailing Republican opponent Josh Hawley 47-44. This is a state where Republican internal pollsters seem to be flooding the zone; of the 10 most recent polls here, five of them are GOP polls (McLaughlin, Vox Populi, Remington, and The Polling Company, which is Kellyanne Conway’s shop). If you weed out online pollsters (YouGov and Ipsos) as well, that basically just leaves you with two “gold standard” pollsters, CNN and Fox News, which, collectively, give McCaskill a narrow lead.
Requisite safety warning, though: keep in mind that Republican internal pollsters aren’t necessarily wrong. (Some of them were some of the most accurate pollsters in 2016, for instance.) Partisan pollsters only tend to release results when it suits their agenda, but they aren’t making stuff up out of whole cloth. One concept that might give some comfort to any Republican readers here is that, at the very least, Republican candidates in the competitive Senate races are in a position where they can release internal polls and seem credible doing so.
Contrast that with the House, where my colleague Steve Singiser (and CNN’s Harry Enten as well) have been repeatedly pointing out that relatively few Republican internal polls are getting released, especially when compared with polls released by Democratic candidates. The history of the ratio of internal poll releases in recent elections suggests that that’s a good indicator that, by contrast, in the House, the Republicans are flailing. That, of course, illustrates the differences between this year’s Senate and House battlefields: many of the big Senate races are in less-populous, usually solidly-red states where there’s still a Republican cushion, while many of the key House races are being fought in affluent suburbs where traditional GOP support has cratered.
So let’s take a quick look at this week’s “totem pole”:
STATE |
D CAND. |
D AVG. |
R CAND. |
R. AVG. |
DIFF. |
FLIP? |
OHIO |
Brown (inc) |
50 |
Renacci |
34 |
+16 |
|
WEST VIRGINIA |
Manchin (inc) |
49 |
Housley |
38 |
+11 |
|
WISCONSIN |
Baldwin (inc) |
52 |
Vukmir |
42 |
+10 |
|
NEW JERSEY |
Menendez (inc) |
49 |
Hugin |
41 |
+8 |
|
MINNESOTA (SP.) |
Smith (inc) |
46 |
Housley |
41 |
+5 |
|
MONTANA |
Tester (inc.) |
48 |
Rosendale |
45 |
+3 |
|
INDIANA |
Donnelly (inc.) |
42 |
Braun |
41 |
+1 |
|
ARIZONA |
Sinema |
46 |
McSally |
45 |
+1 |
D FLIP |
FLORIDA |
Nelson (inc.) |
47 |
Scott |
46 |
+1 |
|
NEVADA |
Rosen |
45 |
Heller (inc.) |
45 |
0 |
D FLIP?? |
RED LINE |
RED LINE |
|
RED LINE |
|
|
|
MISSOURI |
McCaskill (inc.) |
44 |
Hawley |
47 |
-3 |
R FLIP |
TEXAS |
O’Rourke |
44 |
Cruz (inc.) |
51 |
-7 |
|
TENNESSEE |
Bredesen |
42 |
Blackburn |
50 |
-8 |
|
NORTH DAKOTA |
Heitkamp (inc.) |
40 |
Cramer |
54 |
-14 |
R FLIP |
MISSISSIPPI (SP.) |
Espy |
26 |
Hyde-Smith +
McDaniel
|
45 |
-19 |
|
This week, the averages pencil out to no net change in the Senate, if you give Jacky Rosen the benefit of the doubt in Nevada and assign her the win in the currently-tied race. (The average found Rosen trailing by 1 last week, so that’s actually some mild progress for her.) The Democrats would trade pickups in Arizona and Nevada for losses by incumbents in Missouri and North Dakota. (Though, like I said above, you’ll want to take the Missouri average with a grain of salt, considering how heavily that average is dominated by GOP internal polls.)
Although that fractional change in Nevada (which has to do with a Public Policy Polling poll that gave Rosen a 2-point lead last week, though maybe it also has to do with that bad Emerson poll from two weeks ago scrolling further down the trendline) is much more consequential for purposes of Senate control, the big gainer for this week was Joe Manchin in West Virginia, who has led the entire cycle. This week’s average shows him moving out to a 49-38 lead, up from a lead that had fallen to only 43-31 last week (thanks to several Republican internal polls that purported to show a close race, and no other polls being released). Instead, on Monday, a new poll from Strategic Research on behalf of local TV stations gave Manchin a 52-36 lead, the largest lead he’s posted all cycle. He was already better positioned than many of his other red-state Democratic colleagues, and if this poll is to believed, he’s moved fully out of the danger zone.