Doug Goes Out On A Limb-- Predicts Coakley By 10 Points Tomorrow

-by Doug Kahn

“As expected, Coakley wins the Senate seat by more than 10%.” That would have paraphrased the lead paragraph of most Wednesday post-election news stories about the Massachusetts Senate election to permanently replace Ted Kennedy. Boring.
 
Why not make it fun, a close race, a man-bites-dog story? Not a problem when you have fraudulent Rasmussen polling to stir the pot, and the usual collection of idiot news anchors and political commentators. 

This is a good test of my thinking. Am I looking at politics and thinking about this election rationally, or am I just being an optimist, hoping that voters are still sensible people who won’t elect candidates from the Beavis and Batshit wing of the Republican Party? Okay, I’m going to take a deep breath, and say this: Coakley wins by 10%. The third party candidate gets 3%. Massachusetts is a Democratic state.
 
Really, no one who works in politics can predict an individual election with any degree of confidence, not an election where both candidates have wide recognition and have run credible campaigns, meaning they’ve reached most voters several times. I base this on a simple premise: anyone who actually could consistently predict these elections would be making their living betting on them, would be rich, and we wouldn’t be hearing from them on websites or on the news.
 
You can only know what usually happens, what is most likely to be true, what would be a practically unprecedented result. Don’t go searching through the evidence for secret portents or unique local factors. If you do, you’ll be a very smart person who ends up saying some very silly things. 

For instance, Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com said 2 weeks ago that Scott Brown’s chance of winning was about 5%. Then, after another one of those completely bogus Rasmussen polls of “likely voters” he tweeted that Scotty had a 15-25% chance of winning. But wait, the Boston Globe poll then said Coakley was going to be okay, and he changed his mind again.
 
I think it’s quite likely that Nate Silver’s reputation (deserved or not) as a Brainiac has caused some very dishonest pollsters to try and figure out how to affect his opinion. If they can get Nate to say the race is a toss-up it helps get resources for Scott Brown, and gives him more tv coverage, gets people to the polls.
 
Logically, you need some pretty firm evidence to outweigh the recent voting history of the Massachusetts electorate. Both Senators and all 10 House members are Democrats. And the governor, and both houses of the legislature. So Coakley, the Democrat, is heavily favored to win to begin with. In 2006 she was elected statewide to Attorney General, and got more votes than Ted Kennedy, who was at the top of the ballot. 

What’s the evidence against? Automated internet polling done of supposedly likely voters by provably biased organizations, namely Rasmussen, ARG, and the laughable Pajamas Media poll that has Scott Brown up by 15%. Follow the reasoning behind getting the morons in the media to believe Scott is winning: since Coakley was heavily favored, there must be a movement to the right in the country, people are really sick of Democrats, and so on and so forth.
 
How dishonest are they, actually? If you can figure this out, then you can figure out what the numbers really should be.  

ARG has Brown up by 3%, but they have him winning 20% of Democrats and Coakley winning 1% of Republicans. Brown also wins younger voters. None of this matches election results previously in Massachusetts or anywhere else in the United States. It’s very easy to skew polls of likely voters. Likely voters, obviously, should be people who almost always vote. It’s easy to figure out who these people are; you just get the list from the state. (Numerous companies make a good living selling software and data on voters.) ARG calls people and asks them if they’re definitely going to vote. This method is notoriously inaccurate, particularly in special elections, which people consider less important when election day actually rolls around. When they’re mad-as-hell tea-bag types on the phone with a polling firm, they just know they’re going to vote. Anyway, you get the point.  

Rasmussen had Coakley up by 2% on January 11th. In the Rasmussen voting universe, likely voters in Massachusetts give Obama a 57% approval rating, which is 10% more than they give him in the Rasmussen national polling. DailyKos polling has Obama’s approval broken down by region. His net Northeast approval is in the high 70s. Massachusetts being an extremely Blue state, this means the Rasmussen likely voter screen (and they won’t disclose their methodology, by the way) is off by 10% or 20%. If they actually do the polling; that is, if they don’t just pull the numbers out of their asses in order to drive the news cycle. I’m just saying.
 
One final thing about the polling. Research 2000, the DailyKos pollers, have Coakley up by 8%. Coakley’s internal polling numbers have been ‘leaked’ to the media on a daily basis. Supposedly they say it’s a toss-up, and that she might lose. Yes, depending on who shows up at the polls. Who can get turnout up for a Democrat in Massachusetts? Can you spell O-B-A-M-A? Now guess who went to Massachusetts to campaign for Coakley. Because it’s a toss-up, you know.