2018 Congressional Generic Ballot and House Polls Megathread - Part 3

[libertpaulian]

(R)asmussen's best attempt to cook the numbers in favor of the GOP is a TIE?!?!?!?!

Yeah...there'll be no red wave.

but what if they aren't cooking the numbers?

what if it's the D+something polls being cooked?

(R)asmussen is well-known in the pollster world as a GOP operative outlier.

[psychprofessor]

(R)asmussen's best attempt to cook the numbers in favor of the GOP is a TIE?!?!?!?!

Yeah...there'll be no red wave.

but what if they aren't cooking the numbers?

what if it's the D+something polls being cooked?

They are the only pollster with a Trump approve above 50 - if you believe that then sure, believe the GCB is tied right now

[ON Progressive]

(R)asmussen's best attempt to cook the numbers in favor of the GOP is a TIE?!?!?!?!

Yeah...there'll be no red wave.

but what if they aren't cooking the numbers?

what if it's the D+something polls being cooked?

(R)asmussen is well-known in the pollster world as a GOP operative outlier.

NYC Millennial Minority is not worth your time. The guy unironically thinks socialists should vote for the GOP "to stick it to the Democrats", even though Republicans constantly use their ideology as an insult and have the exact opposite priorities of socialists on both economic and social issues.

[Arkansas Yankee]

Rasmussen is really sticking its neck out.  My recollectionection is it was pretty good in 2010 and 2014.  It pegged the national vote in 2016.  They were a littlee too optimistic for Romney in 2012, but not excessively so.

Right now they are excessively optimistic for the GOP compared to other pollsters.  Are they far out in the outfield.  I hope they are right.  Would they risk their reputation?

The New York Times / Siena College Polls do not seem to support D+10 generics.  Neither doe the recent Gallup poll finding a historic GOP high of 44% affiliation.

Oh well in less than 4 weeks I guess we will either have a repeat of national 2016 or Virginia 2017.  Or will the House be 2017 and the Senate be 2016.

[Ebsy]

I can't say I can recall Gravis ever polling a Congressional District before. Good comedy!

[Virginiá]

It’s almost as if we should be patient before hot takes

When the oven says they are ready, they are ready.

[Zaybay]

If the Republicans win on November 6, the Democratic Party will be encouraged to transform even further along the lines of Democratic Socialism. It's that simple.

And that's excatly what Republicans want. By the time 2020 rolls along Democrats will have moved so far to the left that they nominate a Candidate which aligns themselves much more in line with Bernie Sanders like Harris, Gillibrand, Warren or Booker and that will be easy pickens for Trump cuz all 4 will be totally out of the Mainstream.

Look, Republicans for the last 3 POTUS Elections tried to nominate a Social Conservative. 2008 Huckabee, 2012 Santorum and 2016 Cruz. It didn't work because all 3 were unable to cobble together enough Votes from the Northeast & Midwest.

The problem with that theory is the overton window, which states that ideas can move out and in of the mainstream based on the influence of ideas and the pull of parties. Trump did a lot of "out of the mainstream" things, but the overton window saved him, throwing rather odd ideas into mainstream thought. If the Ds nominate someone like Sanders, the same thing would happen. In fact, it kinda already has happened in house races across the US.

[GeorgiaModerate]

YouGov, Oct. 7-9, 1162 registered voters

D: 47 (+2)
R: 41 (+1)

[Virginiá]

Take the discussion with NYC Millennial Minority's weird views to another thread please

[Yank2133]

YouGov, Oct. 7-9, 1162 registered voters

D: 47 (+2)
R: 41 (+1)

When will they switch to a LV screen?

[Former Dean Phillips Supporters for Haley (I guess???!?) 👁️]

Just a week or two ago, amidst the height of the Kavanaugh/Ford hearings, chances of Republicans holding the House seemed to be increasing dramatically. The generic ballot had the Dem lead shrinking, down to the point where Republican Gerrymanders could maybe hold the House. Lindsay Graham was hailing himself as a hero to all self-respecting angry white males who like beer. People were talking about the Reps holding the House with the help of the gerrymander wall. That big batch of FOX Senate polls had just come out, including the ND-SEN one with Cramer up 53-41 (Oct 2).

Now a week or two later, the Trumptard base of the GOP has gotten what they want - a partisan psychotic hack on the court - and suddenly ... Republican numbers in the GCB are plummeting, starting to drop even below 40, and Democrats are posting more and more double-digit leads. Here are the 7 most recent polls on the 538 GCB (date on the graph is the date the poll ended), plus the most recent Yougov poll that just came out but they haven't entered in yet at the time I am posting this.



If you look at the trend here, it is pretty horrific for the GOP. The thing to notice is not just that the Dems are going up, but the Reps are going down even more quickly, at a shocking pace. The GOP is literally hemorrhaging support, like a GenX drunk hemorrhaging vomit after a hard night of heavy blackout drinking:



If you extrapolate the trend all the way to election day, it looks like this, with Republicans headed towards support of about 17% if current trends continue:



Don't get me wrong. It probably won't be quite that extreme, and the Republicans should eventually hit some sort of minimum floor of support like a wobbly alcoholic preppy falling flat on his face (maybe around 30% or so, the minimum deplorable amount???).

But regardless of if or when they hit a hardwood floor and regardless of whether they break their nose or not in the process of so doing, the implications could be horrific for the Republicans. You do not win elections - even elections rigged by gerrymandering and a tilted Senate map - with 40% (or less) of the vote. Remember, those Senate polls that seemed to be so favorable for the GOP all came out at the height of the Kavanaugh bump (the FOX news Senate polls all ended on Oct 2, the exact day when the charts above begin).

Because if the numbers hold, the Dems will have a commanding majority in the House - possibly even a veto-proof majority - and many of the close races in the Senate will break in favor of the Dems. Republican oil workers in North Dakota will not be allowed to vote because of an accidental Republican own-goal. There will be a historically low amount of ticket splitting, meaning that Republican losses will come up and down the entire ballot, not just in a few high profile races. The wipeout will be uniform and near absolute, with even Republican dog catcher candidates unable to differentiate themselves from Trump amidst a surge of angry female Democrats turning out at near-Presidential levels and voting straight ticket Dem.

It is also clear, that if this trend holds, even if Democrats do not pick up the Senate this year, they will defeat Trump and pick up the Senate in 2020, and then we'll have a Democratic trifecta. Democrats will pick up Governorships and State Legislatures across the nation, block and overturn Republican gerrymanders, and install gerrymanders of their own to lock in a permanent Democratic majority in the House for the rest of the decade. And as old White males increasingly die off and are replaced in the electorate by Millennials and Gen Z, things only get worse for the GOP.

For these voters, indelible in the Hippocampus is the uproarious laughter and the high fives of Republican Senators as they celebrated having rammed Kavanaugh through without conducting a proper FBI investigation, only a sham investigation in which the FBI was not allowed to follow up leads and forced by the White House to turn away tips and witnesses.



In other words, for these voters, this was a traumatizing experience that will stick in their memories permanently. They will remember it in a month when they go to vote. They will also remember it 2 years from now, and 30 years from now as well. Whereas for the Republicans, they got what they wanted and lack the traumatizing experience solidifying their memories. They will have forgotten all about Kavanaugh by the time of election day. Indeed, the nosedive in the polls shows that this process of forgetting is already well underway as the next news cycle attracts their attention.

All across the country, hordes of angry women are awakening each morning with a new sense of purpose. What was formerly confined within the boundaries of New Hampshire is spreading like an unstoppable contagion across the fruited plain, to the tremendous detriment of the Republican party. Republicans face the prospect of losing the women's vote - a majority of voters - by 30 points as in the CNN poll, spurred on by this profound sense of anger, rage, and anguish. I am not sure the Republicans understand what they have unleashed.

These voters are also worried that with Ginsburg surely retiring or god forbid passing (she’s up there in age) then you’re looking at 6-3 conservative majority - not just that but with at least 2 of those judges highly partisan. Whereas for Conservatives, they do not particularly care about Ginsburg, because they already have their majority. And Republican base voters are complacent, fooled by Trump's claims that Republicans are sure to hold the house, so they don't think they need to even bother voting.

I’ve always advocated for a split court. Four Conservatives. Four Liberals and 1 Centrist. Which is what we HAD until - well, until booze bag got confirmed.

[Alabama_Indy10]

How long did it take you to type all of that?

[Hindsight was 2020]

This....is......beautiful

[Former Dean Phillips Supporters for Haley (I guess???!?) 👁️]

How long did it take you to type all of that?

Longer than the time FBI was allowed to conduct its supplemental Kavanaugh background investigation.

[Brittain33]

More on that Monmouth Poll of PA-17. Didn't this district used to fall into pro-life Melissa Hart's district?

PENNSYLVANIA CD17 POLL:
Impact of Kavanaugh #SCOTUS nomination
10% more likely to support @KeithRothfus
8% more likely to support @ConorLambPA
2% more undecided
79% no impact

[Yank2133]

I still can't get over how dumb political reporters are.

The GOP has spun everything as something that will "motivate" their base for the midterms. From tax cuts, to Clinton and Pelosi, MS-13, and now Kavanaugh. Yet, political reporters still repeat everything these people say as truth.

You never see this with Democratic operatives. Political reporters (rightfully) realize that they are full of ****, but why can't they do this with GOP operatives?

[Virginiá]

I was about to #WalkAway, but this post gave me the courage to stay and fight.

[Oryxslayer]

Two days ago: Dems In Disarray!

Today: Dem Tsunami!

Never change Atlas, never change...

[Antonio the Sixth]

OK, since I'm tired of cherry-picking and hot takes, I went and computed 538's generic ballot estimates  for every single day up to a year before the election (really annoying that they don't let you visualize the margin already, but I digress). Here's what it looks like:



While this is already a pretty smoothed average (538 changed their methodology because their previous estimate was very jumpy), if we want to look at the macro trends we have to smooth it out even more. Fitting polynomials of order 4, 5 and 6 yields basically identical results. In every case there have been 4 major trends over the past 11 months: a steep climb up to around New Year's Day, a slow but steady slump from then until around May 20, another sustained climb until September 25, and a so far very slight decline since then. Note that while the polynomial curve "predicts" that the slump will accelerate and end up somewhere between 7 and 7.5 by election day, but polynomials aren't usually good forecasting tools, and this might easily change if the GCB estimate stays above 8 for a few more days as it is now.

Interestingly, 8.0 is exactly the average of all GCB measures for the past 11 months, so I wouldn't be surprised if this is where it ends up stabilizing. It hasn't really moved more than 2 points away from it in a sustained way, and has usually stayed within 1.

[Former Dean Phillips Supporters for Haley (I guess???!?) 👁️]

Why was my beautiful thread merged in here if the other one wasn't? It is too beautiful to be lost and quickly buried in this megathread.

[Virginiá]

Shame on you Antonio! Math doesn't belong on Atlas, unless it is a formula describing the expected heat of future hot takes.

(no but really, interesting, thanks for the graph)

[Gass3268]

Everyone want a good laugh?

https://twitter.com/politics_polls/status/1050097135624978432?s=21

[GeorgiaModerate]

Everyone want a good laugh?

https://twitter.com/politics_polls/status/1050097135624978432?s=21

McLaughlin, indeed.

[Sestak]

LOL

[Yank2133]

Everyone want a good laugh?

https://twitter.com/politics_polls/status/1050097135624978432?s=21

Lmao!