As the days before the election dwindle to single digits, the campaigns are switching focus from persuasion to mobilization.
While there may not be many minds left to be made up, as always, key questions remain on which voters will be sufficiently motivated to go to the polls.
Former President Bill Clinton’s appearance on the South Side Monday for Tom Wolf, the Democratic candidate for governor, is emblematic of that effort. He can be counted on to echo the message carried by his wife, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, along with first lady Michelle Obama in Philadelphia appearances earlier this month — that positive polls notwithstanding, Democrats in general and Mr. Wolf in particular will lose if Democrats don’t show up on Nov. 4.
That’s a note Mr. Wolf would sound again and again as he circumnavigated Western Pennsylvania on a bus tour this weekend, traveling though smaller communities like Johnstown, Greensburg and Washington that were once reliably Democratic, but have become increasingly hospitable to Republican candidates.
Across the state, in the Democratic bastion of Philadelphia, President Barack Obama was to appear for Mr. Wolf on Nov. 2, betting that his popularity there endures and would produce dividends for the Wolf campaign, despite his slipping approval ratings in the state as a whole.
After passing out a blizzard of economic development checks in the region in recent days, Gov. Tom Corbett remained in Western Pennsylvania Saturday, rallying with supporters who were poised to go door to door, spurring GOP turnout.
Speaking last week, Mr. Corbett pointed to the Clinton visit as evidence of the Republican contention that most public surveys have overstated the Democrat’s advantage.
“We have our own internal polls and we’re narrowing on that,” he said. “And they’re bringing Clinton to Pittsburgh. That speaks volumes.”
The RealClearPolitics average of the public polling in the race puts the Democrat’s advantage at 11 percentage points. That average Wolf lead, while still substantial, was narrowed somewhat over the 10 days by two surveys that found Mr. Corbett trailing by single digits. The New York Times/YouGov survey saw Mr. Corbett trailing by 9 percentage points, 49 percent to 40 percent. A Magellan poll, sponsored by the conservative website Keystone Report, put Mr. Wolf’s lead at 49 percent to 42 percent.
Those margins might seem to suggest that the race is becoming dramatically more competitive when compared with other recent polls that found Mr. Wolf leading by margins ranging from 17 points, in a Quinnipiac University survey, to 20 points in a Franklin & Marshall College survey and 21 points in the latest Muhlenberg College poll. But that’s not an apples to apples comparison. Looking at the movement between earlier surveys from the same polling firms, the shift toward Mr. Corbett is more modest. A Magellan survey in September had shown the Democrat with a 9-point lead, compared with 7 points in its last survey. YouGov’s most recent margin of 9 points was also a 2-point gain for Mr. Corbett compared with its previous look at the race, released in September.
Aside from the direction of the race, that polling dissonance leaves the question of which surveys have been capturing the more accurate snapshots of the race. In a statement with its results last week, the Magellan firm suggested that some other surveys, including the F&M polls, were assuming a turnout too heavily skewed toward Democrats. Terry Madonna, who directs the F&M survey, shrugged off the observation, noting that the survey was using the same methodology that had allowed it to compile a solid track record over years of assessing Pennsylvania races.
Both F&M and Muhlenberg were preparing for new surveys this week, results that will be studied avidly by the campaigns, which of course conduct their own internal polls, to see if there is any convergence in the public numbers.
“We all agree that Corbett is doing better among Republicans,” Mr. Madonna said of the earlier results showing that the incumbent, who had been dogged by weakness with his partisan base earlier in the year, was finally benefitting from GOP voters coming home to the standard bearer. But it would take more than that for Mr. Corbett to overtake his challenger in a state where Democrats outnumber Republicans.
History suggests that Mr. Corbett will benefit from the fact that Republicans are more likely than Democrats to show up at the polls in a year in which the president is not on the ballot. That was a major factor in his comfortable victory over Democratic nominee Dan Onorato in 2010. Amid the rise of the Tea Party, and the limping economy, Republicans voted in waves that year while, according to exit polls, Democratic turnout fell dramatically from the levels of 2008.
Mr. Madonna and Chris Borick, who directs the Muhlenberg poll, both said that their data so far suggested that while Republicans are somewhat more interested in this election than Democrats, the differential in turnout would not be nearly as marked as in 2010.
“It’s not on the same level as 2010,” said Mr. Borick. “Neither base is highly engaged right now, but Democrats are a little less engaged.”
That tracks national trends. Frank Newport, who directs the Gallup Poll, noted in an essay last week that “Americans’ collective thought given to this election is lower than has been the case in the two most recent midterm elections in 2010 and 2006. Likewise, enthusiasm and self-reported motivation to vote are also down. The differences are particularly large compared with 2010, with a drop of 13 percentage points in thought given to the election, 18 points in motivation to vote, and a drop of 9 points in enthusiasm.”
Mr. Madonna predicts that the Pennsylvania turnout Nov. 4 would be lower than in either of the last two midterms — 49 percent in 2006 and 46 percent in 2010.
“We will be lower than those two,” Mr. Madonna said. “Part of it is a long grueling campaign without a lot of new information — it’s still education, still taxes, the only thing that’s changed is the volume of negative ads.”
He also observed that the low-turnout likelihood was increased by the fact that there was so few other competitive races in the mix in the state. Despite the abysmal approval ratings for Congress in general — 14 percent in the latest Gallup survey — no incumbent congressman in the state appears to be in jeopardy of losing his seat in November.
“There’s such a dearth of competition,” Mr. Madonna said.
He noted that, while Democrats still harbor hopes of undercutting a 27-23 GOP majority in the state Senate, their ambitions are focused on only a handful of genuinely contested races. And he pointed out that in more than 100 of the state House seats, the incumbent faces no opposition.
Politics editor James P. O’Toole: jtoole@post-gazette.com, 412-263-1562
First Published: October 26, 2014, 4:00 a.m.
