The AL-SEN Class 2 special election - polling, stats and history

I was thinking that it was far more likely to be Independents who would write in Mickey Mouse as a sign of derision towards both candidates.

 

Probably a mixture of both and generally, people who write write-ins in a state that allows them would simply have not voted had they not been allowed, and in the case of AL, since it is only 1.7% and the Director of the BOE clearly stated just two weeks ago that there was a 5% hurdle in this case in order for the write-ins to be recorded into the congressional record (I am not holding my breath to see if he actually does this, or not) - so, the argument that the write-ins swung the election to Democrat Jones is a red-herring from the get-go. Folks, that is all part of representative Democracy: that people get to vote for whom they want. In the moment that someone casts a write-in vote I simply don't care which party, if any, they usually support. It's THEIR choice and well, that's that.

The fact is that Jones was supposed to be a hapless DEM nominee, a sacrificial lamb and he was supposed to accept his 36%-37% of the vote and concede quickly. But instead, partly because he ran a spitfire campaign, he is going to come in at or over 50% in one of the 5 reddest states in the nation, according to the 2016 partisan rankings.

It's not just that Moore, a total jerk, was also a fatally flawed candidate. It's also that Jones was a competent campaigner and didn't let Moore trip him up.

 

You make an excellent point.

At no point was the Dem candidate considered to be enough of a threat that it was necessary to mount a campaign impugning his integrity. By the time the threat materialized it was probably way too late to even start the opposition research. Doubtless that will change in 2020 when this seat comes up again.

 

538 did an analysis of the wide variance in the polling data and pinpointed the largest explanation down to the methodology, specifically robocalls vs live person calling.

The robocalls tended to show very much in favor of Moore and the live person tended to show much more in favor of Jones. There are a few reasons to explain the difference (like the "embarassment" factor), but one of the biggest is the fact that, by law, robocalls were not permitted to call cell phones. And thus, the demographics of people who have access to a land line - older and whiter - played a large roll as well.

 

This is absolutely correct.

The robocalling polls only exist because they are cheaper.

17 years ago, it wouldn't have made such a difference, for even with the increased use of Cell-phones, most Americans still had and used a landline. These days, entire swaths of the population have no landlines at all, because they don't need them.