海角大神

Several polls that have come out over the past couple days have drawn media attention, in no small part because they have been different in some way from what we鈥檝e been seeing before. There鈥檚 been, of course,聽the SurveyUSA poll out of Kentucky聽purporting to show Alison Lundergan Grimes surging in Kentucky,聽Larry Pressler pulling into second place in South Dakota聽and, yesterday,聽a group of polls from Fox News聽that seem to be good news for Republican candidates and聽a CNN/ORC poll聽that seems to show Pat Roberts gaining ground on Independent Greg Orman in Kansas. Keeping all of that in mind,聽NBC鈥檚聽First Read聽notes this important caveat:

To emphasize that last point, a new Gallup poll signals that聽voter engagement is lower than it was during the previous two rounds of midterm elections:

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The poll goes on to note that Republicans do tend to say that they are more engaged with the election than Democrats, which is typical of midterm elections and suggests that the GOP will maintain its traditional advantage. However, there does seem to be a clear lack of enthusiasm across the board regardless of party or demographic group, and that makes it harder for pollsters to figure out who might actually turn out to vote in November. It鈥檚 always a guessing game, of course, and how individual polling companies make that guess will heavily influence how their polls come out, but that guess becomes harder to make when it becomes less clear how likely people are likely to turn out to vote. If you get that guess wrong, then your polling isn鈥檛 going to be a very accurate reflection of either the current state of the race, or what is likely to happen on Election Day.

Because of this, the polling we see over the next month may be all over map, which of course will cause the cable 鈥渘ews鈥� networks and political talking heads to react breathlessly with every development. Some of it may actually turn out to be a significant indication of the state of the race, but much of it is also likely to turn out to be noise that is best ignored. In that regard, it is good to remember that聽the final Gallup poll of the 2012 presidential election had Mitt Romney narrowly leading Barack Obama, and that a聽Gallup poll from two weeks earlier had Romney with a seven-point lead,聽As it turned out, of course, Gallup鈥檚 polling models for 2012 were completely off, and it ended up showing up in the results. There were also many polls from other companies during the October 2012 timed period that聽purported to show the presidential race tightening. In the end, of course, the president ended up winning by a comfortable margin. The point is that individual polls are likely to be all over the place, and they may not even be accurate. Rather than hyping each individual poll because it helps 鈥測our鈥� candidate, if you really want to have some educated idea of what鈥檚 going on in the races for Senate and Governor, pay attention to the poll trackers at places like聽RealClearPolitics聽and聽Polltracker, along with the forecasts from聽Nate Silver,聽Sam Wang,聽Election Lab, and others. You鈥檒l get a much clearer picture of what鈥檚 going on, and you鈥檒l avoid the repeated cycle of excitement and disappointment that comes with each individual poll.

Doug Mataconis appears on the Outside the Beltway blog at http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/.