… While Republicans should not be measuring their drapes for the Senate majority offices just yet, key data in those lean/toss-up Senate seats from the early 2014 merge of the NBC/WSJ polling done by my business partner Bill McInturff and his Democratic counterpart Fred Yang at Hart Research serves as a measuring tape for a forecast of a Republican takeover.
The merge consists of 432 interviews across the twelve states. A merge takes all the interviews from questions replicated over a time period (in this case January-April 2014) and combines them to allow a great in-depth look at subgroups.
When the political environment and issue questions from the four months are distilled to just the interviews in the swing Senate states, a problematic national political environment turns down right ugly for the chances of Democrats to hold onto the Senate. Within those states, the data is significantly worse for Democrats (and thus obviously better for Republicans) on every measure. CONT.
Glen Bolger, Public Opinion Strategies