Tag Archives: West Virginia

Online Polling Project Across 50 States Yields Surprising Results

YouGov, an international Internet pollster, has been surveying campaigns and corporate marketing programs in many regions around the world. While most are skeptical of Internet polling, as they should be, YouGov’s highly sophisticated and targeted approach has enjoyed a better than average record in terms of projecting political victories around the world.

YouGov and the New York Times recently partnered to conduct a simultaneous 50-state US polling project. The results were released yesterday. By and large, the vast majority of their polls track with what we have seen from other survey research firms over the past months. The YG/NYT project polled the key statewide campaigns in every state, and then asked a generic party question about US House preference.

Here, we highlight some of the surprise findings:

Alaska: The Last Frontier polls were very different from the preponderance of other polling from this electorate. While the Senate race has been tight for months, this YouGov survey of 452 registered Alaska voters gives Sen. Mark Begich (D) a 46-35 percent advantage, adjusting for leaners as Continue reading >

Energy Issue Looms in W.Va. With EPA; Ellis Makes a Move in Michigan

The air wars have been underway for months in southern West Virginia, and the American Energy Alliance just upped the ante this week.

The issue advocacy organization is targeting vulnerable Rep. Nick Rahall (D-WV-3) with a new ad about what they claim is the Continue reading >

Nebraska, West Virginia Slates Set

The Tea Party and conservative organizations such as the Club for Growth struck gold in the Nebraska Senate primary last night as Midland University president Ben Sasse easily won the GOP nomination to succeed retiring Sen. Mike Johanns (R). The late polling that predicted Sasse pulling away and early front-runner Shane Osborn, the military veteran and former state treasurer, falling all the way to third place proved precisely accurate. Making a charge at the end that was blunted by outside group attack ads in the closing days was wealthy banker and first-time candidate Sid Dinsdale.

Sasse impressively earned 50 percent of the votes, followed by Dinsdale’s distant second-place finish with 22 percent, and Osborn’s 21 percent. Sasse now becomes the overwhelming favorite to win the general election against attorney David Domina, who won the Democratic nomination with two-thirds of the vote.

The governor’s race came down to a one-point margin, as businessman Pete Ricketts slipped past Attorney General Jon Bruning to claim the Republican nomination and an eventual ticket to the Continue reading >

A Quick Check-in on the Nebraska, West Vriginia and Oklahoma Primaries

Voters in two more states visit their polling places tomorrow, as Republican and Democratic primaries are taking place in Nebraska and West Virginia. A total of 29 states are voting in May and June.

Nebraska

The Republican primary is key in the Cornhusker State, as the GOP nominees for governor and senator will be heavy favorites to win in November.

In the governor’s race, six Republican candidates vie for the nomination but the campaign is evolving into a contest among three. Attorney General Jon Bruning, who lost the 2012 US Senate Republican primary to now-Sen. Deb Fischer, appears to be the favorite going into Election Day. He was just recently endorsed by popular outgoing Gov. Dave Heineman (R), who is ineligible to seek a third term. Former US Senate nominee Pete Ricketts, part of the Ricketts family who founded the Ameritrade national investment house and own the Chicago Cubs baseball club, and State Auditor Mike Foley are also viable candidates. With no run-off election system, the candidate Continue reading >

The Senate’s Tenuous Balance of Power

Today, most political pundits and election handicappers are suggesting that Republicans will successfully wrest the Senate majority away from the Democrats in the November election, but is the GOP victory path really so clear?

To recap the situation for both sides, Democrats are risking 21 of the 36 in-cycle Senate seats, and the Republicans 15. The GOP needs a net conversion of six Democratic seats to claim the majority. Therefore, Democrats can lose five of their own seats and not gain a single Republican state, yet still retain control. Because Vice President Joe Biden (D) breaks any Senate tie vote, the Dems will retain the majority if the partisan division is 50-50.

Building the Republican and Democratic victory models from scratch, the Democrats begin with 34 hold-over seats of the 55 they currently possess. The Republican ratio is 30 (hold-over) to 45 (total seats).

The Democrats

Today, it appears that 10 of the 21 Dem in-cycle seats are well beyond any margin of Continue reading >

The Fourteen Key Senate Races

Since venturing into 2014, a new round of US Senate polls came into the public domain giving us a better picture of the current state of political affairs. Now it appears that 14 seats can be considered competitive, or are on their way to becoming so. The early tightness of so many of these campaigns tells us that we are a long way from being able to confidently predict a national outcome.

For Republicans, the first step in achieving their goal of capturing the Senate majority revolves around the ability to convert the three seats from retiring Democratic senators in states that normally elect GOP candidates. Winning the Montana (Rep. Steve Daines), South Dakota (ex-Gov. Mike Rounds), and West Virginia (Rep. Shelley Moore Capito) seats becomes the foundation for the Republican drive to obtain Senate control. Democrats, on the other hand, need merely to re-elect their incumbents.

As we know, the Senate’s partisan division features 55 Democrats and 45 Republicans. If we remove the 14 competitive seats from Continue reading >

Candidate Filings Close in West Virginia, Kentucky

Still just over a month away from the first votes being cast in the regular 2014 primary election cycle, two more states are finalizing their candidate filings. West Virginia now has an official slate of candidates for the coming election, and Kentucky will close tomorrow.

West Virginia

While it has been common conjecture that Rep. Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV-2) and Secretary of State Natalie Tennant (D) are the unofficial nominees for their respective parties, both do face several nominal primary opponents and will have three Independents joining them on the general election ballot.

Rep. Capito has six Republican opponents for the open Senate nomination, including a former state Delegate and an-ex local police chief. None appears to be a serious Continue reading >

Will Senate Cliffhangers Yield a Republican Majority in 2014?

With the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee now distributing fundraising materials quoting MSNBC as saying that the Republicans “now have the advantage” in capturing the Senate majority this year, it’s a good time to examine the total national picture.

Recent polling does suggest that the Republicans have greatly improved their chances of converting the six Democratic seats they need to claim majority status. In fact, GOP candidates are now either leading or within the margin of error in nine states, while maintaining a slight advantage in their own two competitive seats (Kentucky and Georgia).

Isolating the various states, we begin with the three open Democratic seats from places that have generally yielded a Republican voting pattern since 2000. Currently, the Montana, South Dakota and West Virginia Continue reading >

Early Gaining and Losing

Though reapportionment only happens once every decade anchored to the new census, the gaining or losing of congressional districts for individual states clearly affects delegation politics almost unceasingly.*

The Census Bureau just recently released new population growth figures, based upon July 1, 2013 data, that gives us a very early look into which states may be headed for reapportionment changes in 2020. The projection process occurs throughout the 10-year period and very often the early numbers do not correctly reflect end-of-the-decade trends, so predicting now with any certainty how the population formula will unfold in late 2020 is highly speculative.

That being the case, the new growth numbers suggest that Texas will again gain multiple seats – at this point two – and Colorado, Florida, Montana, North Carolina, and Virginia appear headed for one-seat additions. Offsetting these increases are again New York, Pennsylvania, Continue reading >

Results From MA-5; Major New Senate Polls

MA-5 Special Election

The race for the Democrat nomination last night, tantamount to special election victory in the Boston suburban 5th Congressional District, was projected to finish within a razor-thin margin. It didn’t.

State Sen. Katherine Clark, riding a large turnout from her Malden-Melrose political base, pulled away from Middlesex County Sheriff Peter Koutoujian when the last quarter of the vote was counted to clinch the Democratic nomination with 32 percent of the vote. Koutoujian finished 10 points behind at 22 percent. In third, exceeding his polling expectations, was state Rep. Carl Sciortino notching 16 percent. State senators Will Brownsberger and Karen Spilka brought up the rear with 15 and 13 percent, respectively. Spilka was the most disappointing performer based upon previous polling releases. Her own two Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research Group surveys both showed her in second place, just a single point behind the leader.

Not only did Sen. Clark prove to be the strongest candidate, her polling firm, GBA Strategies, turned in the most accurate data. In their released poll of voters over the Sept. 23-25 period, GBA correctly projected Clark’s lead to be far greater than one point, as she led Spilka 27-18 percent with Koutoujian a close third posting 16 percent.

On the Republican side, attorney Frank Addivinola easily claimed his party’s nomination, securing 49 percent of the vote as compared to physicist Mike Stopa’s 26 percent, and former US Marine Tom Tierney’s 25 percent. Sen. Clark and Addivinola now advance to the Dec. 10 special general election, but that vote will not likely be much of a contest as Clark is now the prohibitive favorite to win the seat.

Democrat turnout dwarfed that of Republicans, as 69,525 members of their party cast ballots within the crowded field of candidates. The GOP turnout only reached just 9,692 voters, a testament more to the low number of registered Republicans as opposed to an abnormally low participation rate. The grand total of 79,217 voters is Continue reading >