The Florida primaries are today, but I’m not posting on them today. That way I have time to address – by popular demand* – all the new generic ballot polls, and see where the Swingometer is landing lately.
As always, I’m using the trusty Real Clear Politics archives to find the polls. So let’s go.
There are many polls to look at here. This month we’ve had seven of them. Two of them polled likely voters, and five polled registered voters. I look forward to PPP’s shift to LVs, but we’ll see that next time.
In fact, there are so many polls that I’m not going to give a detailed writeup of each. What I will do is process each individually in one big, honking table, and then average them. It will be a weighted average. Polls of likely voters (Time and Rasmussen Reports) will get a double weighting.
| Two party splits | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Poll | Filter | D | R | Swing |
| 2008 | Actual | 56 | 44 | – |
| Gallup 8/22 | RV | 48 | 52 | R+16 |
| Rasmussen 8/22 | LV | 45 | 55 | R+22 |
| Time 8/17 | LV | 46 | 54 | R+20 |
| AP/GfK 8/16 | RV | 48 | 52 | R+16 |
| Fox 8/11 | RV | 46 | 54 | R+20 |
| CNN/OR 8/10 | RV | 48 | 52 | R+16 |
| PPP 8/9 | RV | 48 | 52 | R+16 |
So, taking the weighted average, the mean swing is 18.7. It almost feels silly to go to all that trouble of weighting the polls when anyone could have eyeballed that figure anyway, thanks to every single poll giving Republicans a lead within that band of +4 to +10 in the two party splits.
Regardless, we take that 18.7, put it into the Swingometer, and the result is… Republicans gain 52 seats from 2008’s results for a 230 R-205 D House majority, a larger win for John Boehner than either of Nancy Pelosi’s (and in fact exactly equal to her D+31 2006 and D+21 2008 wins combined), and slightly smaller than Newt Gingrich’s R+54 of 1994. (Historical figures per Wikipedia because I’m not basing anything on these numbers).
* Two or three people might not sound like a popular movement, but it is big enough for me.
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