Midterm Calculus
It’s not usually wise to focus too much on individual polls, but Sunday’s CNN/ORC poll in North Carolina is worth a little extra attention.
The
poll’s top-line findings are unsurprising. As with other polls, it
finds Senator Kay Hagan, a Democrat, leading Thom Tillis, the Republican
challenger, by three percentage points, 46 to 43 percent.
But
there was a piece of good news for the Republicans buried inside the
poll, one that might influence our view of the race: Mr. Tillis’s
favorability rating.
The conventional view holds that Ms. Hagan has a lead
because Mr. Tillis is unpopular. He’s the speaker of the state’s
unpopular House of Representatives, and he passed an education budget
that the Hagan campaign and its allies have hammered over the summer.
It’s
a seemingly sound story line. Given the state’s demographics and her
own ratings, Ms. Hagan should probably be behind in this race; if she’s
ahead, it stands to reason that Mr. Tillis is the problem. It also lines
up with Ms. Hagan’s advantage in fund-raising — perhaps her only
advantage — which has allowed her to spend millions attacking Mr. Tillis
on education.
There’s
one weakness in this narrative: the amount of evidence supporting it. A
USA Today/Suffolk poll in August found Mr. Tillis’s favorability rating
at minus-14, but there isn’t much other evidence to back it up. Most of
the polls haven’t asked about Mr. Tillis. Nonetheless, it was enough
for me to come down on the side of a Hagan advantage when I weighed in last week. Minus-14 is a pretty big number, and it’s consistent with Ms. Hagan’s surprisingly solid position.
Enter
the CNN/ORC poll on Sunday. It found that 47 percent had a favorable
impression of Mr. Tillis, and 40 percent had an unfavorable view. It
didn’t find Ms. Hagan faring much better than she has in other polls: 46
percent favorable, and 47 percent unfavorable.
Midterm Elections 2014
The latest news, analysis and election results for the 2014 midterm campaign.
If
there were more surveys showing Mr. Tillis as unpopular as the
conventional view, then perhaps we could discount the CNN/ORC poll as an
outlier. But in the absence of more evidence to the contrary, one
should at least be open to the possibility that Mr. Tillis is more
popular than was thought.
That
opens the door to a different view of the race: that Mr. Tillis is
poised to narrow or eliminate Ms. Hagan’s lead behind undecided voters
who view him favorably and who view Ms. Hagan and President Obama
unfavorably.
Mr.
Tillis might also benefit from the inevitable decline in the support of
Sean Haugh, a libertarian candidate who attracted 7 percent of the vote
in the CNN/ORC poll.
Even
in that scenario, Ms. Hagan would still probably be near even-money to
win. She’s already at 46 percent of the vote, and her magic number is
probably only 48 or 48.5 percent in a contest in which minor party
candidates are poised to take at least 3 percent of the vote.
But if Mr.
Tillis is as popular as the CNN/ORC poll suggests, then her three-point
lead could easily evaporate, along with the basis for the view that
she’s favored.
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