And I’m sure that you some the more creative among you could come up with other wholly reasonable and defensible sets of assumptions, including some that fall outside the goalposts of the scenarios contained herein. To state the obvious, one’s assumptions matter a lot! Any of these are reasonable and defensible sets of assumptions. Now that’s really a toss-up: Coakley at 52 percent to win and Brown at 48.įinally, let’s restore the original assumptions of Scenario 1, but include the hypothetical polls that we introduced in Scenario 5.Ĭoakley down to 41 percent to win, Brown up to 59, putting the contest just on the fringe of “toss-up” and lean GOP. I have no idea what the Rasmussen and R2K polls might say, or whether they’re in the field at all. Warning: the following two charts contain hypothetical polls that don’t yet exist. That would mean Rasmussen shows Brown ahead by 3 points (rather than trailing by 2), and R2K shows Coakley ahead by 3 points (rather than 8). Suppose that both pollsters come out tomorrow (as both are rumored to be in the field) with a new poll showing a 5-point decline in her numbers. However, even if we’re emphasizing the more recent polls, Coakley is still benefiting from sort of middle-aged Rasmussen and Research 2000 polls, when some pollsters have observed a further decline in her numbers since those surveys came out. Coakley bounces back up to 58 percent under these assumptions: We’ll also increase by 50 percent the uncertainty parameter, owing to the fact that special election polling is harder than regular Senate polling. We’ll keep the half-life at 7 days to place more weight on the most recent polls, but leave the CrossTarget poll out and the regression result in. Next, let’s make a middle-ground set of assumptions that I’m personally somewhat inclined toward. Coakley drops all the way down to 17 percent!
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