I'm an unaffiliated voter from CT. I wish I had a moderate senator in CT like Susan Collins instead of the two radical loons Chris Murphy and Richard Blumenthal that are there now. Go Ms. Collins, go!
Is Murphy the one with the public midlife crisis? The one who just walked out on his wife and kids, for a much younger aid or lobbyist? What a guy! Wasn't he once, slightly moderate?
Now he sounds like Elizabeth Warren in a flannel shirt and beard.
I would love to hear from TLP on polling error and why the white working class is so difficult to poll. That seems to bedevil a lot of people - especially when races get close.
College-educated voters much more likely to take polls and offer their opinions. Skews the projected electorate and makes modeling that much more difficult since the working-class sample is also likely to be not representative of the actual voting pop and then it gets weighted up. So when there is a real surge of working-class and rural voters in the election, as happened in 2020 in Maine, the polls are all wrong.
I think that is a great explanation and I buy it, but it bothers me that so many otherwise solid polling operations are weak at weighting. In particular, in the last few elections they seem to err in one direction (left) and miss the rightward tilt by a few points. A few points would not be notable IF it was dispersed in both directions, but it does seem suspect. Perhaps herding or bias? I don’t know. Or perhaps my read is off. It certainly does the Dems no favors to constantly be surprised in elections where the polling had them running much stronger than the result.
Moreover, election polling has a checkpoint for accountability. We KNOW if a poll was good because we have a result to measure against. But given the issues above, how is one to measure and trust opinion polling? Something like Trumps approval rating or the popularity of the Ds or Rs has to be taken with a grain of salt because weighting is so suspect - no?
The reason is not bias per se but that there used to be more random errors in terms of partisanship. In recent years, however, the types of people who are hard to reach (working-class, rural, low engagement) have been voting more R/Trump and thus the discrepancy (at least compared to election results where the sample electorate is not always same or close enough to actual). Good polling outfits are doing more to try to correct this but it's expensive and response rates for polls are just abysmal. No one answers the phone and few people will click on survey solicitations or email links.
And good polling aggregators are still the best bet for useful trend lines and combined data. Not all polling is untrustworthy, just need to apply due skepticism (particularly when things are split; when a finding has pretty high or low nos more reliable) and avoid sweeping conclusions. Cheers.
I’m in Texas, dreading our Senate choices next year, and believe John Cornyn has been a hard working, bipartisan legislator, which is why he was censured and may lose our GOP primary. Senator Collins has also been a hard working, bipartisan legislator. The Senate will be worse off without her there. She has worked well with Patty Murray on appropriations and HAS spoken out against Trump and Vought rescissions. No other Mainer can replace Collins’ knowledge, skill and seniority in the Senate. Our country needs more centrist Senators willing to cross the aisle to solve problems. If a D wins, I hope they are more like Angus King and Janeane Shaheen than Bernie Sanders.
I think Cornyn is very likely to win, assuming Paxton doesn't drop out before the primary.
Paxton's lead is gone. He and Cornyn are now tied, and I think at one point Paxton was up 10 points. Ken's affair has ticked off the Texas Far Right, and Texas Rep moderates have long loathed him. Cornyn, meanwhile, has gone out of his way to let Texans know he has moved Right
Paxton also has potential mortgage fraud issues, that could cause him problems post Trump. Maybe most importantly, by the time the divorce is over, Paxton may be far more interested in a bigger paycheck than $175K in the Senate, that requires a home in DC.
Look for Trump to engineer a lucrative Paxton off ramp, complete with a pardon for the mortgage fraud, at the end of Trump's term, when polls show Paxton could very well lose as the Texas Senate nominee. Reps will not risk a Dem Texas Senator, with tight polls and the potential for more dirty laundry, after a primary. Paxton was married almost 40 years. If there was one affair, there were probably more. That is irrelevant in CA, but in Texas , it will keep some Reps at home.
I am really concerned about Wesley Hunt’s entrance to the GOP primary. I have friends who don’t like Paxton but think Cornyn is too “establishment”—meaning he actually does his job and legislates?? Wesley Hunt has done little other than look for the next higher position (he sought Trump VP and DOD) since he became a politician in 2019.
I think Hunt is 10 points back or so. I have never considered him a serious candidate, but you may be right. I hope not, not a fan either.
Cornyn followed gun control, with flirting with the immigration bill that would have codified Biden's numbers into law. In Texas, that is either very brave or very stupid. Texas saw more border crossers in a 4 year period, than nearly any nation on earth, not adjacent to a war or natural disaster, in most of world history.
Gun control doesn't bother me, although I tend to think it is of limited value. 90% of guns used in crime are illegal, regardless of what laws they pass. The immigration law was far more important to me. I was nearly in a bad wreck, when I ended up in the middle of migrants attempting to outrun ICE. Had I been a kid on a phone, rather than an old lady paying attention, it could have easily been fatal. Many of my neighbors have other stories.
In any event, every couple of weeks Cornyn now has a "look at how Conservative I am " mailing or email. Im sure you get them too. I was always going to vote for Cornyn anyway, but I have more than a few very conservative friends who were Paxton fans. Now they want Ken out of the race.
I think it is factual, not meant as a personal attack. What has Hunt accomplished in Congress? Seems Texans would want to see a strong legislative record in the House if Hunt wants voters to elect him to Senate. He DID seek to be Trumps VP and Defense Secretary.
If a legislator cross’ the isle it is because of Trump. If a staunch zealot wins it is because of Tump. Are all political actions in the country only motivated by Trump? What a powerful man he has become. Who would ever think that a state that relies so much of the manly fishing industry, would think a man can become a woman and not have an unfair advantage against those women would have issue with electing a Senator who believes the same?
First it will be interesting to see who makes it through the Democrat primary; a neophyte or old governor.
Strictly on the merits Collins wins, whomever the Democrats put up. If she runs against the oyster farmer, with a thin resume, the Democrats will need to raise twice as much as the last candidate they ran against Collins, the former Maine House Speaker. If she runs against the current governor, who is 77 years old, how many decades before she might chair the Senate Appropriations Committee? Susan votes based on the merits of the issue, has decades of experience, and is chair of a very powerful Senate committee.
I’m not sure that a bio of Mills that omits her fighting Trump to keep boys playing girls’ sports should be described as “defensible”. Given that neither profile references any of the negatives that are likely to come up during the campaign they should only be described as “even handed” with regard to the primary.
This highlights a major issue for any party. When you only poll based on the positives aka large print of any issue or candidate, it makes it far too easy for your opponents to bring it all down by simply pointing out the negatives aka fine print.
Yes, good point. I meant defensible in the context of the primary. There's nothing really here highlighting Collins's strong points or her possible opponents' weak points as you indicate. This is part of the reason I think these polls are all inflated on D side and underestimating Collins who is weaker than ever but not out of it at all.
If Platner were to win he would maybe be the only true working class senator. He attended, and returned to, yet didn't complete at George Washington.
Ordinarily a great candidate, Plattner's only problem is the national Democratic Party. Plattner is probably good on many issues, but if he won he would have to vote for legislation coming from left of Antifa.
I'm an unaffiliated voter from CT. I wish I had a moderate senator in CT like Susan Collins instead of the two radical loons Chris Murphy and Richard Blumenthal that are there now. Go Ms. Collins, go!
Is Murphy the one with the public midlife crisis? The one who just walked out on his wife and kids, for a much younger aid or lobbyist? What a guy! Wasn't he once, slightly moderate?
Now he sounds like Elizabeth Warren in a flannel shirt and beard.
I would love to hear from TLP on polling error and why the white working class is so difficult to poll. That seems to bedevil a lot of people - especially when races get close.
College-educated voters much more likely to take polls and offer their opinions. Skews the projected electorate and makes modeling that much more difficult since the working-class sample is also likely to be not representative of the actual voting pop and then it gets weighted up. So when there is a real surge of working-class and rural voters in the election, as happened in 2020 in Maine, the polls are all wrong.
Sorry to take your time with one more comment. :)
I think that is a great explanation and I buy it, but it bothers me that so many otherwise solid polling operations are weak at weighting. In particular, in the last few elections they seem to err in one direction (left) and miss the rightward tilt by a few points. A few points would not be notable IF it was dispersed in both directions, but it does seem suspect. Perhaps herding or bias? I don’t know. Or perhaps my read is off. It certainly does the Dems no favors to constantly be surprised in elections where the polling had them running much stronger than the result.
Moreover, election polling has a checkpoint for accountability. We KNOW if a poll was good because we have a result to measure against. But given the issues above, how is one to measure and trust opinion polling? Something like Trumps approval rating or the popularity of the Ds or Rs has to be taken with a grain of salt because weighting is so suspect - no?
The reason is not bias per se but that there used to be more random errors in terms of partisanship. In recent years, however, the types of people who are hard to reach (working-class, rural, low engagement) have been voting more R/Trump and thus the discrepancy (at least compared to election results where the sample electorate is not always same or close enough to actual). Good polling outfits are doing more to try to correct this but it's expensive and response rates for polls are just abysmal. No one answers the phone and few people will click on survey solicitations or email links.
And good polling aggregators are still the best bet for useful trend lines and combined data. Not all polling is untrustworthy, just need to apply due skepticism (particularly when things are split; when a finding has pretty high or low nos more reliable) and avoid sweeping conclusions. Cheers.
I’m in Texas, dreading our Senate choices next year, and believe John Cornyn has been a hard working, bipartisan legislator, which is why he was censured and may lose our GOP primary. Senator Collins has also been a hard working, bipartisan legislator. The Senate will be worse off without her there. She has worked well with Patty Murray on appropriations and HAS spoken out against Trump and Vought rescissions. No other Mainer can replace Collins’ knowledge, skill and seniority in the Senate. Our country needs more centrist Senators willing to cross the aisle to solve problems. If a D wins, I hope they are more like Angus King and Janeane Shaheen than Bernie Sanders.
I think Cornyn is very likely to win, assuming Paxton doesn't drop out before the primary.
Paxton's lead is gone. He and Cornyn are now tied, and I think at one point Paxton was up 10 points. Ken's affair has ticked off the Texas Far Right, and Texas Rep moderates have long loathed him. Cornyn, meanwhile, has gone out of his way to let Texans know he has moved Right
Paxton also has potential mortgage fraud issues, that could cause him problems post Trump. Maybe most importantly, by the time the divorce is over, Paxton may be far more interested in a bigger paycheck than $175K in the Senate, that requires a home in DC.
Look for Trump to engineer a lucrative Paxton off ramp, complete with a pardon for the mortgage fraud, at the end of Trump's term, when polls show Paxton could very well lose as the Texas Senate nominee. Reps will not risk a Dem Texas Senator, with tight polls and the potential for more dirty laundry, after a primary. Paxton was married almost 40 years. If there was one affair, there were probably more. That is irrelevant in CA, but in Texas , it will keep some Reps at home.
I am really concerned about Wesley Hunt’s entrance to the GOP primary. I have friends who don’t like Paxton but think Cornyn is too “establishment”—meaning he actually does his job and legislates?? Wesley Hunt has done little other than look for the next higher position (he sought Trump VP and DOD) since he became a politician in 2019.
I think Hunt is 10 points back or so. I have never considered him a serious candidate, but you may be right. I hope not, not a fan either.
Cornyn followed gun control, with flirting with the immigration bill that would have codified Biden's numbers into law. In Texas, that is either very brave or very stupid. Texas saw more border crossers in a 4 year period, than nearly any nation on earth, not adjacent to a war or natural disaster, in most of world history.
Gun control doesn't bother me, although I tend to think it is of limited value. 90% of guns used in crime are illegal, regardless of what laws they pass. The immigration law was far more important to me. I was nearly in a bad wreck, when I ended up in the middle of migrants attempting to outrun ICE. Had I been a kid on a phone, rather than an old lady paying attention, it could have easily been fatal. Many of my neighbors have other stories.
In any event, every couple of weeks Cornyn now has a "look at how Conservative I am " mailing or email. Im sure you get them too. I was always going to vote for Cornyn anyway, but I have more than a few very conservative friends who were Paxton fans. Now they want Ken out of the race.
Disagree 100% with this personal attack.
I think it is factual, not meant as a personal attack. What has Hunt accomplished in Congress? Seems Texans would want to see a strong legislative record in the House if Hunt wants voters to elect him to Senate. He DID seek to be Trumps VP and Defense Secretary.
"prides himself on splashy family glamor shots more than anything else" -- cheap and personal
You are right. I took that out of my comment.
If a legislator cross’ the isle it is because of Trump. If a staunch zealot wins it is because of Tump. Are all political actions in the country only motivated by Trump? What a powerful man he has become. Who would ever think that a state that relies so much of the manly fishing industry, would think a man can become a woman and not have an unfair advantage against those women would have issue with electing a Senator who believes the same?
First it will be interesting to see who makes it through the Democrat primary; a neophyte or old governor.
Strictly on the merits Collins wins, whomever the Democrats put up. If she runs against the oyster farmer, with a thin resume, the Democrats will need to raise twice as much as the last candidate they ran against Collins, the former Maine House Speaker. If she runs against the current governor, who is 77 years old, how many decades before she might chair the Senate Appropriations Committee? Susan votes based on the merits of the issue, has decades of experience, and is chair of a very powerful Senate committee.
I’m not sure that a bio of Mills that omits her fighting Trump to keep boys playing girls’ sports should be described as “defensible”. Given that neither profile references any of the negatives that are likely to come up during the campaign they should only be described as “even handed” with regard to the primary.
This highlights a major issue for any party. When you only poll based on the positives aka large print of any issue or candidate, it makes it far too easy for your opponents to bring it all down by simply pointing out the negatives aka fine print.
Yes, good point. I meant defensible in the context of the primary. There's nothing really here highlighting Collins's strong points or her possible opponents' weak points as you indicate. This is part of the reason I think these polls are all inflated on D side and underestimating Collins who is weaker than ever but not out of it at all.
If Platner were to win he would maybe be the only true working class senator. He attended, and returned to, yet didn't complete at George Washington.
Ordinarily a great candidate, Plattner's only problem is the national Democratic Party. Plattner is probably good on many issues, but if he won he would have to vote for legislation coming from left of Antifa.
Polymarket favors the Ds 56/44 though they don't say which one.
https://polymarket.com/event/maine-senate-election-winner?tid=1760532334533