Tester's wins have always been squeakers here in MT, but polling trends are concerning. Two issues seem to be at play:
1) influx of people moving to MT seeking "redder" pastures in last several years, and 2) barrage of negative ads across media (people tuning out). Tester needs to up his game here. Rallies, more meet & greets, debate with Sheehy, campaign event with Tim Walz. Trying to 'do something' via LTEs & phone-banking.
The fact that they got such divergent results doesn't prove they're not credible. Let's say the real sentiment in August was even and it's now Sheehy +4. They got samples that were somewhat off from that and didn't massage them.
Yea all the recent polls seem to follow a very similar pattern of massively undersampling younger voters (including those under 50). Whether that's due to a perception of the electorate being much older or just being unable to reach enough young voters who knows. But as I've said before, Montana is a high turnout state, this is a presidential year, you have a strongly contested senate race and you got an abortion amendment. There's something very skewed here.
The Montana Senate race has been bugging me. 538 shows two polls from RMG Research:
August 15: Tester +5
September 24: Sheehy +7
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/senate/2024/montana/
That’s a 12-point swing in just over a month, from the same pollster! This doesn’t seem credible to me. Any thoughts?
I think both polls are wrong and that the race is very close.
Agree. Something stinks about the polling coming out of MT.
Something is rotten in the state of Montana.
Tester's wins have always been squeakers here in MT, but polling trends are concerning. Two issues seem to be at play:
1) influx of people moving to MT seeking "redder" pastures in last several years, and 2) barrage of negative ads across media (people tuning out). Tester needs to up his game here. Rallies, more meet & greets, debate with Sheehy, campaign event with Tim Walz. Trying to 'do something' via LTEs & phone-banking.
I trust Tester as a campaigner and politician
I do too, but if polls reveal he's trailing, I hope his campaign can effectively respond. This isn't the Montana of 2018.
All the more reason to get Tester the support he needs.
The fact that they got such divergent results doesn't prove they're not credible. Let's say the real sentiment in August was even and it's now Sheehy +4. They got samples that were somewhat off from that and didn't massage them.
I see my post was unclear. I was suggesting that a 12-point swing wasn’t credible – not that the pollster lacks credibility.
Yeah, that's probably too big a swing to have actually happened.
Yea all the recent polls seem to follow a very similar pattern of massively undersampling younger voters (including those under 50). Whether that's due to a perception of the electorate being much older or just being unable to reach enough young voters who knows. But as I've said before, Montana is a high turnout state, this is a presidential year, you have a strongly contested senate race and you got an abortion amendment. There's something very skewed here.