GA-SEN SurveyUSA: Purdue 40, Generic D 37

[Yellowhammer]

Democrats are 55k votes away from winning statewide. That can be achieved almost by new registrations alone. Perdue doesn't even have enough of a brand to be as formidable as some people seem to think he is. You have a freshman Senator with no real profile up for re-election in a state that is slipping away from his party.

Tomlinson & Ossoff do not have the same appeal to Voters that Stacey Abrams or Michelle Nunn had in 2018 and 2014. Simple is that!

And by the way I do expect a lot of Split Ticket Voting in States with competitive Senate Races. American Voters might throw out Trump BUT they might also want to have a check on the new Democratic President if that person wins (whomever his Name is)

History is against Democrats winning the Presidency and the Senate. The last three times the Upper Chamber flipped was in a MidTerm (1994, 2006, 2014). The Alabama Senate Race looms large over any Democratic Senate Control.

History is never a good indicator of what will happen in future elections, because each cycle is different.

So California is a tossup in 2020?
One of the most mind-numbingly stupid things I've ever read on this forum.

[Adam Griffin]

Democrats are 55k votes away from winning statewide. That can be achieved almost by new registrations alone. Perdue doesn't even have enough of a brand to be as formidable as some people seem to think he is. You have a freshman Senator with no real profile up for re-election in a state that is slipping away from his party.

Tomlinson & Ossoff do not have the same appeal to Voters that Stacey Abrams or Michelle Nunn had in 2018 and 2014. Simple is that!

And by the way I do expect a lot of Split Ticket Voting in States with competitive Senate Races. American Voters might throw out Trump BUT they might also want to have a check on the new Democratic President if that person wins (whomever his Name is)

History is against Democrats winning the Presidency and the Senate. The last three times the Upper Chamber flipped was in a MidTerm (1994, 2006, 2014). The Alabama Senate Race looms large over any Democratic Senate Control.

History is never a good indicator of what will happen in future elections, because each cycle is different.

So California is a tossup in 2020?
One of the most mind-numbingly stupid things I've ever read on this forum.

More like trends are trends until they're not, bellwethers are bellwethers until they're not, etc. We may all be guilty of it at some point or another, but a sample size of 3 or whatever is not a guarantee things will play out the same forever.

[Pollster]

This poll is atrocious for Perdue, loads of bad signs for him:

He's already consolidated the Republican base whereas "Democratic opponent" still has 15-20% of the Democratic base to fall in line.

A combined 47% of independents say they "need to know opponent" or are "not sure" - essentially both meaning undecided.

Moderates are overwhelmingly against him.

This poll is not atrocious for him.
-this poll is clearly oversampling democrats because no, in the reality the GA electorate is not D+1, far from it. Even in 2018 the GA electorate was still R+4
-this poll has Biden winning by 4, which is almost impossible considering how hard it is for democrats to crack their statewide ceiling of 48%

No, this poll is atrocious for Perdue. Paying attention to toplines only is not the proper way to read a poll - toplines are almost always the result of weighting which is entirely based on the pollsters' assumptions. This has a much smaller impact on crosstabs. Any good pollster advising a campaign will spend 10% of their time on the polling conference call talking about toplines and 90% talking about the crosstabs.

The crosstabs here are perilous for Perdue. He is getting demolished among moderates and is drastically under where a GA Republican needs to be with independents a year out, especially for an incumbent (in 2014, our numbers had Deal ~15% higher among independents than Perdue is right now at the same point, and we considered that to be a sign that the race would be competitive). He is in incredibly bad shape and has a lot of work to do.

Also, "oversample" is a strategic polling technique that means to collect an additional group of responses from a demographic of interest (i.e. racial minorities, people under 24, people in a certain media market) that is then weighted appropriately into the full sample in order to get a more accurate read on that demographic and ergo the entire electorate. What you are referring to is "overrepresentation" - a poll giving more weight to a certain demographic than it warrants - which will almost never actually effect the accuracy of a poll (unless it is extremely drastic) because of the margin of error and the central limit theorem.

[Amenhotep Bakari-Sellers]

It's a poll showing that the race is heading into runoff, that's it, Perdue was vulnerable last time and won. He wins races that are completetive

[Sir Mohamed]

It's a runoff if Perdue doesn't achieve 50, anyways

There is gonna be a run-off in either GA seats. If the GOP cant get to 50%

It's a poll showing that the race is heading into runoff, that's it, Perdue was vulnerable last time and won. He wins races that are completetive

Great analysis, as always.

[OneJ]

The issue with the argument that GA is unable to flip before 2025 is that it ignores how rapidly the state is shifting in the Democrats' direction. The swing from 2016 to 2018 itself should be a huge warning sign for Republicans especially when Georgia was more R-leaning in 2018 than in 2016 (just some evidence that Georgia is not a state that is affected by the national environment). Democrats can easily make up the 1 point deficit that Abrams lost by, particularly in the presidential race.

I can still see Perdue outperforming Kemp unless the national electorate ends up being like >150 million voters.

Given the polling showing such high enthusiasm for next year's election (enthusiasm already in the 70s!), it wouldn't surprise me one bit if we ended up reaching that magic number of 150 million.

[Frenchrepublican]

This poll is atrocious for Perdue, loads of bad signs for him:

He's already consolidated the Republican base whereas "Democratic opponent" still has 15-20% of the Democratic base to fall in line.

A combined 47% of independents say they "need to know opponent" or are "not sure" - essentially both meaning undecided.

Moderates are overwhelmingly against him.

This poll is not atrocious for him.
-this poll is clearly oversampling democrats because no, in the reality the GA electorate is not D+1, far from it. Even in 2018 the GA electorate was still R+4
-this poll has Biden winning by 4, which is almost impossible considering how hard it is for democrats to crack their statewide ceiling of 48%

No, this poll is atrocious for Perdue. Paying attention to toplines only is not the proper way to read a poll - toplines are almost always the result of weighting which is entirely based on the pollsters' assumptions. This has a much smaller impact on crosstabs. Any good pollster advising a campaign will spend 10% of their time on the polling conference call talking about toplines and 90% talking about the crosstabs.

The crosstabs here are perilous for Perdue. He is getting demolished among moderates and is drastically under where a GA Republican needs to be with independents a year out, especially for an incumbent (in 2014, our numbers had Deal ~15% higher among independents than Perdue is right now at the same point, and we considered that to be a sign that the race would be competitive). He is in incredibly bad shape and has a lot of work to do.

Also, "oversample" is a strategic polling technique that means to collect an additional group of responses from a demographic of interest (i.e. racial minorities, people under 24, people in a certain media market) that is then weighted appropriately into the full sample in order to get a more accurate read on that demographic and ergo the entire electorate. What you are referring to is "overrepresentation" - a poll giving more weight to a certain demographic than it warrants - which will almost never actually effect the accuracy of a poll (unless it is extremely drastic) because of the margin of error and the central limit theorem.

I don't understand your whole point, but it's totally stupid for a pollster to over-represent some groups (democrats and minorities in this case) just because they could be ''demographic of interest'' ; first of all why do such groups are interesting from a polling perspective ? I mean black voters and liberal democrats will vote for the democratic candidate no matter what, a demographic of interest would be center-right suburban voters who are probably the only kind of swing voters in GA ; but blacks and democrats are not by definition swing voters. Besides, if they want to look at the voting patterns and political interests of democrats and black voters they should simply do a separate poll ; but by definition when you oversample some democratic constituencies in you general election poll you will end up with a result which is biased toward democrats and that's what happened with this poll

[Pollster]

This poll is atrocious for Perdue, loads of bad signs for him:

He's already consolidated the Republican base whereas "Democratic opponent" still has 15-20% of the Democratic base to fall in line.

A combined 47% of independents say they "need to know opponent" or are "not sure" - essentially both meaning undecided.

Moderates are overwhelmingly against him.

This poll is not atrocious for him.
-this poll is clearly oversampling democrats because no, in the reality the GA electorate is not D+1, far from it. Even in 2018 the GA electorate was still R+4
-this poll has Biden winning by 4, which is almost impossible considering how hard it is for democrats to crack their statewide ceiling of 48%

No, this poll is atrocious for Perdue. Paying attention to toplines only is not the proper way to read a poll - toplines are almost always the result of weighting which is entirely based on the pollsters' assumptions. This has a much smaller impact on crosstabs. Any good pollster advising a campaign will spend 10% of their time on the polling conference call talking about toplines and 90% talking about the crosstabs.

The crosstabs here are perilous for Perdue. He is getting demolished among moderates and is drastically under where a GA Republican needs to be with independents a year out, especially for an incumbent (in 2014, our numbers had Deal ~15% higher among independents than Perdue is right now at the same point, and we considered that to be a sign that the race would be competitive). He is in incredibly bad shape and has a lot of work to do.

Also, "oversample" is a strategic polling technique that means to collect an additional group of responses from a demographic of interest (i.e. racial minorities, people under 24, people in a certain media market) that is then weighted appropriately into the full sample in order to get a more accurate read on that demographic and ergo the entire electorate. What you are referring to is "overrepresentation" - a poll giving more weight to a certain demographic than it warrants - which will almost never actually effect the accuracy of a poll (unless it is extremely drastic) because of the margin of error and the central limit theorem.

I don't understand your whole point, but it's totally stupid for a pollster to over-represent some groups (democrats and minorities in this case) just because they could be ''demographic of interest'' ; first of all why do such groups are interesting from a polling perspective ? I mean black voters and liberal democrats will vote for the democratic candidate no matter what, a demographic of interest would be center-right suburban voters who are probably the only kind of swing voters in GA ; but blacks and democrats are not by definition swing voters. Besides, if they want to look at the voting patterns and political interests of democrats and black voters they should simply do a separate poll ; but by definition when you oversample some democratic constituencies in you general election poll you will end up with a result which is biased toward democrats and that's what happened with this poll

You are confusing oversampling and overrepresentation again. Let's say I'm polling for a campaign in Georgia. By default for a statewide survey, I'd want a base sample of 800. African Americans typically respond to polls in lower numbers, so it's likely our collected sample will not have enough to represent their share of the vote accurately. We can weight them up in the final sample, but weighting up is generally dangerous since you are giving outsized weight to a small subsample that has a larger margin of error. To combat this, we will collect an additional 100 responses from only African Americans (an oversample). We then weight this 100 into the 800 base. The extra AA responses are weighted down to their appropriate share of the electorate, and the 900 total responses are weighted down to 800 to avoid giving extra weight to non-AA responses. This gives an accurate overall sample, as well as a much more accurate subsample of AA voters.

Overrepresentation would be if we just included the additional 100 without correcting any of the weights, or if we just didn't collect any additional responses and had the wrong percentage of Black respondents. Even then, over/underrepresentation does not necessarily ruin a poll (unless it's a massive error) due to the central limit theorem.

[Amenhotep Bakari-Sellers]

With GA being competetive at the Prez level, this is a pickup. Dems have better chances in SC, AK, KS, AZ and NC than ME and IA

[GM Team Member and Senator WB]

If one GA seat flips, odds are both of them will, and potentially the Pres race too. Dems seriously need to look at this state, not just for winning back the senate, but the Presidency as well.

[windjammer]

Lean REP.
Perdue isn't going to overperform Trump by much, but Trump should be able to pull it out.

[Nutmeg]

Tomlinson & Ossoff do not have the same appeal to Voters that Stacey Abrams or Michelle Nunn had in 2018 and 2014. Simple is that!

I'm not sure it's quite so simple, but I do agree that the 2020 Georgia Democratic candidates don't seem to have the same appeal as the 2016/2014 candidates had.

[Libertas Vel Mors]

Georgia will flip. That's all that needs to be said and it will flip in part because Republicans aren't going to take the race seriously because they believe Georgia is as safe as Wyoming.

They took it pretty seriously in 2018 lol

[MT Treasurer]

Georgia will flip. That's all that needs to be said and it will flip in part because Republicans aren't going to take the race seriously because they believe Georgia is as safe as Wyoming.

They took it pretty seriously in 2018 lol

Yeah, and still only won it by 1.4%...

[Libertas Vel Mors]

Georgia will flip. That's all that needs to be said and it will flip in part because Republicans aren't going to take the race seriously because they believe Georgia is as safe as Wyoming.

They took it pretty seriously in 2018 lol

Yeah, and still only won it by 1.4%...

Yeah, which'll make them take it even more seriously this time since it's so clearly not Wyoming? I don't get your point, it seems like we agree.