In the primaries on Tuesday night, incumbents won, and the Tea Party lost. The VA is in trouble with the public. And the country’s most advanced weather forecasting data leads to…a real Sharknado. Today is Wednesday, May 21, 2014, and this is HuffPollster.
WHAT DO TUESDAY’S RESULTS MEAN FOR A SPLIT GOP? – Dan Balz: “Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader of the Senate minority in Kentucky, is not a good example of a tea party Republican. In an interview with the New York Times just two months ago, he said of the Tea Party candidates running against the Republicans in power: “We will crush them everywhere.” That’s exactly what McConnell did on Tuesday when he beat the favorite of the tea party, Matt Bevin, to win the Kentucky Senate primary. But what was most surprising about what happened next was how quickly the tea party — which was represented by conservative groups outside of Washington that once wanted the senator to lose — rushed to embrace this personification of the Washington GOP establishment and call for party unity in the fall. It wasn’t a big surprise that the GOP establishment did very well on Tuesday. It was clear from the start that the big races would be won by horses with a lot of experience. But based on the immediate and overnight reactions, Democrats should no longer assume that the Republican opposition will be split, demoralized, and as focused on fighting each other as they are on taking back the Senate.” [WashPost]
TEA PARTY SUPPORT FALLS AMONG GOP – Sarah Dutton, Jenifer De Pinto, Anthony Salvanto, and Fred Backus: “A new CBS News poll suggests that the Tea Party may not have as much support as it did in the 2010 elections. Only 15% of Americans say they support the Tea Party movement today. This is the lowest number since CBS News started asking about the Tea Party in February 2010. In November 2010, right after the midterm elections, 31% of people said they supported the Tea Party. CBS News Polls now show that the number of Republicans who say they support the Tea Party is one of the lowest.” [CBS]
Feelings against those in power don’t lead to losses. – Janet Hook: “National polls show that a lot of American voters want to “throw the bums out.” But so far, people who are already in office have been able to keep their seats. In the 12 states that have held congressional primaries so far this year, no one who was running for Senate or House has lost. Polls show how angry people are with Washington in general and with Congress members in particular. In March, voters were asked in a poll by the Wall Street Journal and NBC News if, if they could, they would get rid of every member of Congress, including their own representative. Some 54 percent said yes; 42 p “recently said no.” [WSJ /(paywalled/)]
Support for same-gender marriage keeps going up – Justin McCarthy: “Americans’ support for a law that says same-sex marriages are legal has gone up again, and now stands at 55%. Over the past year, people who want gay couples to be able to get married have won a number of court cases. This week, federal judges in Pennsylvania and Oregon overturned bans on gay marriage. Support for gay marriage went up from 53% to 54% in 2012, according to two Gallup polls. This shows that acceptance has grown slowly but steadily over the past year, after rising more quickly between 2009 and 2011. In the latest poll, which was taken from May 8-11, there is more proof that support for gay marriage is now above the majority level. This comes after gay marriage supporters won their 14th court case in a row.” [Gallup]
VA IS IN A CRISIS OF PUBLIC OPINION – Emily Swanson: “According to a new HuffPost/YouGov poll, nearly half of Americans think that returning veterans get worse care at Veterans Affairs hospitals than they would at civilian hospitals. This comes after a growing scandal over claims that delays in treatment led to the deaths of veterans. In the poll, 47 percent of Americans said that the care veterans get at VA hospitals is worse than at other major U.S. hospitals, while only 12 percent said it is better. Twenty-one percent said it’s about the same… In the new poll, 72% of those who said they had served in the military and more than 50% of those whose family members are in the military or have been in the past said that care at VA hospitals is worse than at other major hospitals.” [HuffPost]
MELLMAN: PERSUASION WORKS – Mark Mellman (D) brings together more proof that getting more people to vote is not the only way to win: “Most of the time, the number of people who agree is small. But these persuadables have a lot of power in races that aren’t what you’d expect for a president, like upsets and races that go against the norm. In North Dakota, President Obama got 38.9 percent of the vote, but our client, who is now a senator, got 50.5 percent. …it’s clear that Heitkamp won not because she got more Democrats to vote but because she got some Mitt Romney voters to split their ballots. Without convincing, Heitkamp would have lost. .. Get-out-the-vote (GOTV) experiments are much more common than experiments that try to change people’s minds. No one has done the kind of meta-analysis of data I mentioned about GOTV, but I did a simple mean of the effects found in 26 studies and found that persuasion added an average of 3.87 percentage points to the vote of Democrats. Some of these experiments showed that persuasion has a short half-life, while others showed that it lasts longer. Of course, some studies and some GOTV experiments showed that there was no effect. Some also said that the effects would be much bigger, as did some of the GOTV studies. But on average, more votes were added to the total with the persuasion experiments than with the turnout experiments.” [On the Hill]
‘THE WORST POLL IN AMERICA’ – David Weigel: “There is always one, and so far in 2014, Gravis Marketing is in the lead for the prestigious Strategic Vision Award for Botched Polling. In Texas, the last poll of the primary between Rep. Steve Stockman and Sen. John Cornyn gave Cornyn a small lead, 43–28. This was wrong by 25 points. Cornyn beat Stockman…by a score of 59 to 19. In Kentucky, Gravis’s final poll showed that Mitch McConnell was ahead of Matt Bevin by 14 points, 48 to 34. This time, Gravis was a little less wrong because Bevin won 35% of the vote. But McConnell won 60%, which was more than twice as much as Gravis’s win.” [Slate; see also HuffPost Poll on why Gravis didn’t win in Kentucky]
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