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Quote of the Day: Why the Massachusetts Senate Race is Too Close To Call

Posted by JOE GANDELMAN, Editor-In-Chief in Politics

Our political Quote of the Day is actually the beginning and end of a must-read-in-full post/analysis by Nate Silver on the down-to-the-wire Massachusetts special election to fill the late Teddy Kennedy’s Senate seat — an election that all sides agree could have huge implications for both political parties and President Barack Obama’s agenda.

Unlike a lot of poll analysis on this race on weblogs, Silver isn’t not giving an ideological take here. He is stepping back and analyzing. First he presents a list of polls showing that it’s a tossup. Then he writes:

After allocating the undecided voters, the model very tentatively shows a 49.2-48.6 Coakley win, with 2.2 percent of the vote going to third-party candidates.

Now then: why might this projection be totally wrong?

First, this was a model developed for a regular November election, when the Massachusetts election is a special. I’ve often made the analogy between special elections and primaries. If I were to design a model for primaries, I would (i) probably place greater weight on the most recent polls; (ii) almost certainly account for the greater uncertainty in primary polling.

If we were to weight the most recent polls more than we do, this would tend to benefit Scott Brown. And perhaps we should be doing that, but …

It should be kept in mind that a lot of Brown’s support is pretty new, which would ordinarily imply that it is pretty soft. Yes, I know there’s a core of people — maybe a fairly large core — who are really, really excited about Scott Brown. But they only get to vote once apiece. And what the earlier polling established is that it’s almost certainly not 50 percent of the electorate — it might be 35 percent or 40 percent, but it’s not 50 percent. He still needs some swing voters to get him over the finish line. Some of those voters were probably tending toward Brown over the last 7-10 days, when he was winning virtually every news cycle. But the headlines in the last 72 hours — the ones that those voters will be thinking about as they head into the ballot booth — may be a bit more even-handed (especially given Obama’s visit, etc.), and a voter who has swing once is prone to swing again.

The other reason to be at least a little bit careful about fetishizing trendlines and looking at only the most recent polling is that it’s not just you guys who are looking at the trendlines — it’s also the pollsters themselves. And in cases like special elections where pollsters have some tough decisions to make about how to calibrate their turnout models, they may be looking at what the other pollsters are saying in order to determine what they deem to be a “reasonable” result that they want to attach their brand name to.

He continues with his analyis in detail and at the end writes:

Of course, as Democrats have found out to their dismay, Martha Coakley and Scott Brown aren’t generic candidates: Brown is a somewhat better than average candidate, and Coakley an inferior one. At the same time, I feel OK about including this hedge because of the somewhat robust-seeming effect that I documented earlier today, which is that the polls have tended to underestimate the performance of Democrats in very blue states, and Republicans in very red states, in close Senate elections in the past. Including the results from the regression model moves the numbers by a net of 1.8 points in Coakley’s direction, a magnitude comparable to the 2.3-point effect that I found earlier — although admittedly this may be a case of two wrongs making a right.

So, that’s how the numbers got to where they got to. It’s certainly tempting to take the Ockham’s Razor argument for Brown — “look at the trendlines, duuuude!” — which has become the conventional wisdom even if nobody is saying it. And it’s perhaps just as tempting to play the role of the contrarian, sort of buy the rumor and sell the news, and insist that Coakley will leg it out. But for the time being — and subject to change based on last-minute polling — I’m not comfortable with any characterization of this race other than too close to call.

Read it in its entirety for its political content and because it’s a kind of role model for political analysis. Yes, it is “politics done right."

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This is very close!!   Nail biter time!!  LOL.