Politico is out with a new poll that purports to show that Democrats are in trouble in the upcoming midterm elections:
President Barack Obama’s job approval slump and voters’ entrenched wariness of his health care law are dogging Democrats ahead of the 2014 midterm elections, and Republicans have captured a lead in the areas home to the year’s most competitive races, according to a new POLITICO poll.
In the congressional districts and states where the 2014 elections will actually be decided, likely voters said they would prefer to vote for a Republican over a Democrat by 7 points, 41 percent to 34 percent. A quarter of voters said they were unsure of their preference.
President Barack Obama’s job approval slump and voters’ entrenched wariness of his health care law are dogging Democrats ahead of the 2014 midterm elections, and Republicans have captured a lead in the areas home to the year’s most competitive races, according to a new POLITICO poll.
In the congressional districts and states where the 2014 elections will actually be decided, likely voters said they would prefer to vote for a Republican over a Democrat by 7 points, 41 percent to 34 percent. A quarter of voters said they were unsure of their preference.
The poll reveals that voters — even in the more conservative midterm states like Georgia and Arkansas, and tossup House districts in states such as Illinois, West Virginia and California — still lean in a liberal direction on several issues Democrats have championed this year, including immigration reform, pay equity for men and women and background checks for gun purchasers.
But none of those issues comes close to approaching health care as a major concern for midterm voters. Nearly nine in 10 respondents said that the health care law would be important to determining their vote, including 49 percent who said it would be very important.
By comparison, only 28 percent said that immigration reform was “very important” to determining their vote, and 16 percent who said the same of male-female income disparity.
(…)
Among voters who had an opinion of the ACA, the electorate was almost exactly split between those who want to repeal the law entirely and those who favor either leaving it alone or keeping it in place with modifications.
Forty-eight percent of respondents endorsed repeal, versus 35 percent who wanted to modify the law without repealing it and just 16 percent who said it should be left unchanged.
The poll was conducted in sixteen separate states — Alaska, Arkansas, Colorado, Georgia, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, North Carolina, New Hampshire, Oregon, South Dakota, Virginia and West Virginia. Montana, South Dakota, and West Virginia — all of whom are considered potential or likely Republican pickups in the November election. At the same time, though, the entire poll consisted of just 867 people, was conducted over an eleven day period, and has a margin of error of +/- 4.1 percentage points. Additionally, if you dig down into the polling sample you find that the partisan breakdown of poll respondents 34% Democrats, 39% Republicans, and 26% Independents. While I’m not among those people who puts much significance in the D/R/I breakdown for reasons I discussed at length during the 2012 election cycle, it’s worth noting that this is somewhat more pro-Republican than the breakdown in the 2010 Exit Polls, which showed voters nationally at 35% Democratic, 35% Republican and 29% Independent in what was, obviously, a very good year for Republicans. Given those caveats, it’s entirely possible that we’re looking at something of an outlier poll here.
More significant than the outlier issue, though, is the very nature of the poll itself. This wasn’t an individual poll of the races in each of these sixteen states, for example, and it’s at the individual race level that this election is going to be decided. For example, Mark Pryor in Arkansas , Mary Landrieu in Louisiana, Kay Hagan in North Carolina, and Mark Begich in Alaska continue to put out poll numbers that show them as being very competitive against their Republican challengers. Additionally, while some polling has suggested that Republicans could be competitive in states like Michigan, New Hampshire, and Oregon, other polling has shown the Democratic candidates in those states, two of whom are incumbents, holding seemingly solid leads over Republican challengers. Finally, I’m not even sure why Minnesota was included in this mix since Al Franken doesn’t appear to be vulnerable at all this year, which is something of a surprise given how close the 2008 election was in that state. In other words, when you look beyond the forest of this Politico poll, the trees show that the battle for Senate control is far more competitive than the top line numbers would indicate.
At the most, this poll shows us that the 2014 landscape will be tough for Democrats, but that’s something we’ve known for the past year at least. If you really want to know what’s going on in the battle for the Senate, you need to look at the individual state polls.
