You've got to see what Elizabeth Warren said last night at an event about the Republican vision vs. Progressive values.
These bold progressive candidates for Congress have important primary
elections next week. Many face more conservative challengers in heavily
Democratic districts -- if they win their primaries, they'll go into
the general election with major momentum!
Thanks for being a bold progressive.
On May 22, The Campaign for America's Future gave a conference on The
New Populist Majority. The keynote speaker was Elizabeth Warren. The
conference confronted the meme that the US is a "center-right" country.
Most interesting to me was the fact that they obtained poll results
from "the 1%." Typically, "upper income" in polling is considered "over
$250K/yr" or even "over $150K/yr." Such people are rich compared to
most, but they do not have enough money to buy elections with their
spare change.
The poll results for this comparison came from the Russell Sage
Foundation. "Elites" are defined as at or near "the 1%" in wealth with
an average income of $1M/yr or more. The perspectives of this group are
compared to responses from other polls such as Pew and Gallup.
The poll results are below the squiggle.
OurFuture.org, Derek Pugh: Memorandum: The American Majority is a Populist Majority
(I apologize from the fuzziness. I had to cut & paste screenshots from a Scribd document.)
For additional information on the conference, check out these links:
OurFuture.org: The New Populism Conference, May 22, 2014
http://bit.ly/... Program Schedule & Access to Report, 12p [Scribd]
OurFuture.org, Elizabeth Warren: The New Populism Is A Fight For America’s Values
http://bit.ly/...
OurFuture.org, Robert Reich: The 6 Principles of the New Populism (and the Establishment’s Nightmare)
http://bit.ly/...
OurFuture.org, Robert Borosage: What Is The New Populism?
http://bit.ly/... [w video]
OurFuture.org: The New Populism: Overview [pdf]
http://bit.ly/... 4p
OurFuture.org, Robert Borosage:
Report: The New Populism: A Movement & Agenda to Transform America's Economy & Politics
http://bit.ly/
OurFuture.org, Derek Pugh: Memorandum: The American Majority is a Populist Majority
http://bit.ly/... ➔
Survey Results
Republican Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell is fighting for his political life — or is he? The Senate minority leader is
nearly tied in the polls with Democratic opponent Alison Lundergan Grimes. But President Obama’s approval in Kentucky is in the
low 30s,
suggesting the Democratic brand is so unpopular that McConnell could be
fine by the time votes are cast. These competing indicators have led to
myriad predictions from political analysts. The
Cook Political Report rates the race as tossup, the
Rothenberg Political Report puts it in the leaning Republican column, and
Sabato’s Crystal Ball goes one step further at likely Republican. My colleague
Nate Silver’s forecast, meanwhile, says McConnell has a 75 percent chance to win.
Kentucky isn’t the only state with a disparity between what
the polls are telling us and the state’s opinion of Democrats. Dems’
other possible Senate pickup opportunity, according to the polls, is in
Georgia, a state that didn’t treat Obama kindly in 2012. The polls are also close in
Alaska,
Arkansas,
Louisiana and
North Carolina, despite Mitt Romney’s success there in the last presidential election.
More than six months from the midterm elections, current
polling and past precedent are competing for our trust. I analyzed which
measure is more indicative come November, and it turns out that polls
are a more robust metric even though their numbers are still sparse and
there’s still so much time remaining before the election. That’s not to
say that a president’s approval rating is useless: It can help refine
early polls to make them more accurate. This year, when we factor in
both, it doesn’t look promising for Democrats in Alaska, Arkansas,
Kentucky or Louisiana.
For my analysis, I took a RealClearPolitics-style average of all the polls for 107 races since 2006. Separately, for comparison, I collected the president’s approval rating in the matching states in the first half of the year.
Once that was all in place, I produced this chart, which shows that early polls do a pretty good job of forecasting the final vote margin.
The average error between the early polls and the final results was 6.4 points. For comparison, in the 2012 Senate race, polls taken in the final month before the election still
had an average error of 4.8 points.
Overall, the president’s party’s candidate won 83 percent of the time
he or she led in the early poll average and lost 88 percent of the time
when he or she trailed.
A president’s approval rating isn’t as strongly tied to the
ultimate result. There is a link — just a weaker one. Note how much
more scattered the data points are in the chart below compared to in the
chart above.
Of the 58 races in my sample where the president’s statewide approval rating was less than 43 percent (as it is for Obama
now, nationally),
the president’s party’s candidate lost 72 percent. On the other hand,
when a president’s approval rating was greater than 43 percent, the
president’s party’s candidate lost 35 percent of races. In other words, a
president’s approval rating is far from a perfect predictor of how
Senate races will turn out.
But even though polls are better predictors than
presidential approval, the latter still has plenty of information to
offer. When I combined early horse-race polls and presidential approval,
the median error in early-cycle predictions dropped to 4.0 points. That’s nearly two points lower than using the polls alone, and the average error dropped about a point to 5.6 points.
The fact that presidential approval ratings do matter in
addition to early horse-race polling should worry some Democrats in
2014. Right now, I estimate Obama’s approval rating is somewhere between
30 percent and 33 percent in Alaska, Arkansas and Kentucky. In Louisiana, I estimate it to be in the high 30s.
To give you an idea of how the data suggests Obama is going to hurt these candidates, I pulled probabilistic 2014 projections from a model that looks at both the polls
and Obama’s approval rating and one that looks at only the polls. The
table below shows the Democratic candidate’s chance of winning. (The
states included have had at least one poll taken in 2014.)
Using polls and approval ratings, the current close races
in Alaska, Arkansas and Kentucky are estimated to favor Republicans.
(For instance the model gives McConnell a 73 percent chance to win,
which is quite close to Nate’s estimate.) In Louisiana, Obama’s rating
hurts Democratic Senate candidate Mary Landrieu, but the current polling
average this year already had her projected to lose. In Georgia and
North Carolina, Obama’s approval rating is high enough that it doesn’t
hurt the Democrats too much. Democrats Gary Peters in Michigan and Al
Franken in Minnesota are likely helped a bit by President Obama.
Overall, this simple model puts Democratic losses in the Senate at 6.8
seats, just off the
FiveThirtyEight Senate forecast of 5.8 seats, which takes into account other factors including fundraising totals and candidate ideology.
Still, it’s important to emphasize that we’re talking about
early numbers. Twenty of the 107 races from 2006 to 2012 in our model
have errors of 10 points or greater, even when controlling for both
approval and early polls. Ohio Republican Rob Portman beat Democrat Lee
Fisher by nearly 17.4 points in 2010, even though early polls were close
and Obama’s approval wasn’t bad early in the year. The same goes for
Republican Roy Blunt in Missouri in 2010.
So Mitch McConnell’s close
race in Kentucky this year is not just about polls, it’s about Obama’s
approval rating, too. Conversely, even if Obama’s approval rating is
holding Democrats back in the midterms, remember that statewide polls
are usually the more predictive metric. Smart political forecasts
incorporate both.
Harry Enten is a senior political writer and analyst for FiveThirtyEight.
