The Des Moines Register’s Iowa Poll always makes news and with good reason: The pollster that conducts it, Selzer & Company, is among the best in the country, according to FiveThirtyEight’s pollster ratings. On Saturday evening, the poll had an especially interesting result in Iowa’s Senate race. It put the […] Read more »
When Campaigns Poison Compromise
There’s a reason why the people who run campaigns are rarely the people responsible for implementing policy. The job of a campaign operative is to work in absolutes – you win or you lose, there’s no gray area. The job of a policy operative, of course, is to look for […] Read more »
Why Bad Polls Are Good for Business
… At-risk Democrats are trying to tell two different stories to two separate audiences this cycle. Call it playing an outside and inside game—galvanizing the base while assuring the press that everything’s under control. Along with panic-stricken emails about negative polls, voters’ email boxes have been cluttered with ominous warnings […] Read more »
It’s Not the Year of the Elephant
By this point in the campaign season, the projected outcome of the midterm elections has been hashed and rehashed and even inspired some wonk-on-wonk fights along the way. The conventional wisdom is that 2014 is a Republican year—the GOP will keep the House and may well win the Senate. But […] Read more »
Why likely voter polls may be misleading
Those who follow the generic congressional ballot polls may have noticed a certain shift toward the Republicans in recent weeks. … But chances are there was little to no change at all in public sentiment about the upcoming election. The shift in the poll results coincided with a shift in […] Read more »
If Good Policies are Good Politics, Prepare for a GOP Election
The tea leaves are clear: It is going to be a very good Republican cycle. Underlying every election cycle is the basic underpinning of the issue agenda and which party is perceived as being able to better handle the key issues. Pollsters keep getting asked for the “one number” that […] Read more »