The marathon that is the election cycle is now drawing fairly close to the finishing kick, as we are now just three weeks away from Election Day 2014.
And one thing that many of us have long suspected is now becoming obvious: this is going to be a fairly thin cycle for polling, at least in terms of volume.
With just 21 polling days until Election Nerd Christmas, we are still only at roughly 1475 polls for the entire cycle to date. The dearth is most apparent in House polling, where there have been fewer than 200 polls released to date, more than half either by campaigns or by partisan sources electing to poll to satisfy their own curiosity. What this has meant, as a result, is that there are a number of races that are considered either tossups or bare leans to one party or another that have somehow, for the entirety of the cycle, gone completely unpolled.
Therefore, the lack of volume and the relatively partisan nature in House polling this cycle has left us with few tea leaves with which to assess the state of play in the lower chamber of Congress. Following the money has probably become the best way to know the lay of the land, but another little hint is watching for what I like to call “retaliatory strike” polls.
It has long been a “tell”, in the eyes of most of us here in the fraternity of elections nerds, that an unanswered partisan poll is a half-hearted admission that said poll is close to the fairway. But there is a bit of an art to the counter-poll, a skill which we will explore after the jump, along with (gasp!) 82 polls which have dropped out of the sky since last Friday (Oct 10-13).
