…..Where do things stand in terms of the presidential race and Senate races? The polling at the presidential level does seem to be all over the place, as of late. Some polls have it much closer than others. From what we have read, the major difference in the poll results has to do with the type of weighing that the pollsters are using. There is one school of thought that the upcoming election will be much like past elections in terms of the people who vote — and that roughly the same amount of democrats/republicans/independents that traditionally vote, will vote in this election too. In these surveys, the race is relatively tight — the Gallup poll using this methodology has the race at a 2 point margin as of today. There is another theory that the folks who turn out next week will be very different from your usual presidential electorate — for example, there will be more young people who are drawn to Obama and minorities. On top of that, the theory posits that the number of people who self-identify as Democrats or Independent leaning Democrats will out vastly outnumber GOP voters. Gallup uses a variation of this in their daily polling and that has the race at +7 for Obama. Other polls using this methodology have put Obama head by 10 or 15 points. What’s the right school of thought to use? We are just labor relations consultants, not polling experts, so it’s really anybody’s guess. The fact that Gallup — the most non-partisan and respected pollster — is using two different sets of weights should indicate that even they don’t really know. But the common thread in both is that Obama is ahead. That has not changed over the last few weeks. What about the Senate? Our friends over at Kilpatrick Stockton have a nice post about the state of those races. It appears that Republicans are hanging onto their filibuster abilities by a thread — the projections that Kilpatrick Stockton cites puts the Senate in Dem hands by a 59-41 margin. The political reality is that employers and workers could wake up next Wednesday to a Congress that would pass EFCA, a GOP that could not filibuster it, and a President that would sign it.
