Great article about VA and what it means for 2014.
MIND THE POLITICAL INTELLIGENCE GAP. Democrats’ growing use of voter files, histories and other data in their campaign polling, and the persistence of Republican and publicly available polls that don’t, means we may face an outbreak of races in 2014 in which the results diverge from conventional wisdom as they did in Virginia.
In the grand scheme of things, Governor-elect Terry McAuliffe’s “surprisingly close” win doesn’t really affect Democrats. Speculation about a landslide win and headlines about a “stench of death” enveloping GOP opponent Ken Cuccinelli made Team Macker nervous about overconfident supporters not turning out, and they had to spend the post-election week explaining their methods instead of just reveling in their win. Altogether, a small price to pay for staring at a two-point race heading into Election Day with no one else knowing about it.
It matters a heck of a lot for Republicans, who once again—as in the 2012 presidential race—had less of a grasp on the true state of a critical race. We approached a few operatives for this column but they were reluctant to talk in the midst of their own post-mortem. And for purposes of this column, it matters for a political media complex that, with every passing cycle, moves further away from covering races and closer to just trying to predict outcomes.
For anyone who missed HuffPollster’s excellent deep dives into what happened in Virginia, the issue with the public polling is that many don’t account for the fact that a respondent’s enthusiasm for a particular candidate at the particular time of the poll might affect his or her willingness to take part in the poll at all. In other words, the likely voter screens used in public polls may happen too late in the process, resulting in polls that overstate the margin for the candidate who’s “up” and/or understate support for a candidate who’s “down.”
http://cookpolitical.com/story/6436
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