Two New Polls Suggest Hagan Lead

by | Sep 12, 2014 | Carolina Strategic Analysis, Features, Poll Analysis, Polling, US Senate | 2 comments

The latest poll from Rasmussen Reports is not good, to say the least, for Thom Tillis. When I saw the results, I was sure the numbers had been switched. But nope: Kay Hagan leads Thom Tillis by 6%. It’s an 11-point swing from their last poll, conducted last month:

General election
45% Hagan (+5)
39% Tillis (-6)

The press release implies that Hagan’s “war on women” strategy is working. But before we can determine that, we need results from other pollsters. (And not just PPP!)

The Rasmussen poll is now Hagan’s best poll. The worst for her is the YouGov poll released Sunday, where Tillis is up 1. So that’s a range of 7 points. The latest PPP poll, from last month, showed Hagan up 4. And oddly, both camps released internal polls that have weaker numbers for them than some of the public polling. Tillis’s pollster released a survey which showed the race tied. Hagan’s team responded with a survey showing her up 3.

Based on this, I think the Rasmussen poll is wrong. (At least one of the polls – from last month or this month – is wrong. There’s been nothing in this race to bring about an 11-point swing.) But I wouldn’t discount it totally. It’s one poll, and it goes into the average. The RealClearPolitics average now has Hagan up by 1.8 points. Before the Rasmussen poll, Tillis was up by 0.8. A 2-point margin for Hagan seems about as accurate a snapshot for the race right now as any. It’s in between the internal polling numbers touted by both campaigns.

Hagan’s probably ahead right now because she’s massively outspending Tillis on television and her ads featuring testimonials from “average citizens” who say they’ve been harmed by the legislature’s agenda are pretty good. And it’s not just campaign rhetoric when they say they’re going to build the largest midterm organization in a U.S. Senate race in North Carolina history. Planned Parenthood is spending $500,000 on door-to-door canvassers. It’s not at all a fanciful proposition that the electorate this year will be more like 2012 than 2010. And if Hagan can somehow replicate the Obama coalition, she’s going to win. The problem for her is that she has a very low ceiling. That’s why it’s important for Sean Haugh to take a lot of support away from Tillis. Winning with a majority is going to be very tough for Hagan. Winning with a plurality – say 48%, the same percentage Obama got in this state in 2012 – would be much easier.

Averaging the Polls
Hagan/Tillis/Haugh
SurveyUSA 46%/43%/5%
PPP 42%/38%/8%
Suffolk 45.4%/43%/5.2%
YouGov 42%/43%/5%
GHY (D int.) 48%/45%/-
POS (R int.) 44%/44%/8%
Rasmussen 45%/39%/6%

My average differs from RCP because they look only at head-to-heads, which should benefit Tillis. I’ve included 7 polls here, including the latest Civitas poll conducted by SurveyUSA and the two internal polls from the Hagan and Tillis campaigns. Averaging these polls, I get the following results: 44.6% Hagan, 42.1% Tillis, 6.2% Haugh, 7.1% Undecided. Haugh is still taking a disproportionate amount of potential Tillis supporters. There’s no guarantee that Tillis will convince them to vote for him in the end, of course. All the undecided voters in the polls I’ve looked at seem to be Democratic-friendly. There’s no guarantee that they’ll go to Hagan, either. And some of these undecided voters just won’t turn out, period.

This poll average will be updated next week because PPP is going into the field this weekend. Even then, I think it’s best to wait for a non-partisan pollster to go into the field before making any conclusions about where this race has headed. The Rasmussen poll is a bad poll for Tillis – a very bad poll for Tillis – but in the end it’s just one bad poll and nobody should be celebrating or panicking unless it’s followed by surveys with similar results.

The Civitas/SurveyUSA poll

Just hours after the Rasmussen poll came out, Civitas released a survey conducted for them by SurveyUSA. It had the following results:

46% Hagan
43% Tillis
5% Haugh

SurveyUSA last polled the race in March. Then, they found 46% Tillis, 45% Hagan, 9% Undecided. Since then, Tillis has lost 3, Hagan has gained 1, and Haugh has taken 5%, leaving only 6% undecided.

Tillis is behind because Hagan has her party more united behind her than he does (this is unusual for North Carolina). Tillis is also not winning enough conservative Democrats. In his 2010 reelection bid, Richard Burr took about 20% of Democrats. Mitt Romney took about 15%. That’s about the minimum for a Republican to win statewide here. Tillis is taking 10%. Tillis is also losing women by 14, not a good number but much more plausible than trailing with them by 21 points as Rasmussen says.

The composition of undecided voters in this poll looks promising for Tillis. In the three-person race, they’re disproportionately white, conservative, and Republican. Haugh could still lose support (most Libertarians dwindle down to 3% in these North Carolina Senate races), which could benefit Tillis.

From the results of all these polls, it looks like Hagan’s lead is built on a “hybrid coalition” based on traditional moderate Democrats and new-style progressives in the Research Triangle and in other urban areas of the state. It’s the same coalition Hillary Clinton will need if she wants to win here in 2016. If Hagan could somehow replicate the Obama coalition in its entirety (African Americans, young people, and single women), then Tillis would have no path to victory. This is a friendlier electorate than 2012 for Republicans but Hagan is winning just enough Romney voters to eke out a polling lead. This is still a close race but Tillis will have to respond forcefully to negative attacks in order to turn the tide.

2 Comments

  1. larry

    Suggest? Suggest? Ya think John? Come on, if it were Civitas poll and a Tillis squeaker you would not use the word suggest now would ya?

  2. Mick

    Pretty surprising! After the first debate, and after that YouGov poll, I felt that Tillis’ inability to jump over Hagan in a major way (say, 3-5 percentage points) was actually a moral victory for Hagan. But now, this poll not only suggests Hagan did well enough in the debate, but also that there was some sort of negative reaction to Tillis’ comportment, words, wrap-Hagan- around-Obama strategy, his addressing Hagan as “Kay”, and his harpng on Hagan’s now-8-year-old state senate post isn’t working.

    If poll leads hold up in the next 2-3 weeks for Hagan, I would expect Tillis’ ads to take on some outrageous tones, misrepresentations and accusations.

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