Mind The Gap, Lads

Nate Silver takes a look at those frightening Gallup likely poll numbers from yesterday and attempts to parse them with the rest of the likely voter models he's seeing.

Gallup’s “higher turnout” model shows a 10-point gap between the preferences of registered and likely voters (a 3-point advantage for Republicans among registered voters becomes 13 points among those more likely to vote). Their “lower turnout” model, meanwhile, shows a 15-point gap. How do these numbers compare to what other pollsters are showing?

I’m fond of pollsters who publish results among both registered and likely voters. Among other things, it provides valuable information for our forecasting model, which builds in an adjustment to “translate” the results of registered voter polls into likely voter terms. The process by which the model does this is slightly complicated, but in recent weeks, it had been showing a gap of around 4 or 5 points in the Republicans’ favor between the two types of surveys, and had been giving Republicans a “bonus” for that reason.

This gap, however, may vary significantly from polling firm to polling firm. Just this past weekend, for instance, a Newsweek poll showed Democrats 5 points ahead among registered voters — already a good number for them — but with a larger lead of 8 points among likely voters (Newsweek calls them “definite voters”, but it’s basically the same thing ). That is, it showed a 3-point likely voter gap in the Democrats’ favor. By contrast, as we noted, the Gallup poll shows as much as a 15-point swing in Republicans’ favor when a likely voter model is applied.

Regular readers of this blog will not be surprised to learn that the results that most other pollsters are showing lies somewhere in between these two extremes.

Bottom line is Nate's coming up with a likely voter picture showing a Republican advantage of about 5 points, not 13 or 18.  That's the good news.   The bad news for the Dems is that still gives the GOP control of the House, as that translates into a pickup of about 46 seats for the Republicans, they need 39.

Which, interestingly enough, is what Nate Silver's model has been showing for the last couple of weeks now, Republicans with 224 seats and Democrats with 211, or a pickup of 45.

It's still going to be damn close on the Dems keeping the House.  It will come down to several individual races here, and that means people need to vote.