A day or two ago in my Senate Campaign Updates I noted the shocking survey from A+ rated Selzer & Co showing 89 year old Senator Grassley (R-IA) with only a three point lead over challenger Vice-Admiral Mike Franken (D) in his reelection race. Today, I see David Byler of WaPo doesn’t think Grassley needs to be worrying:
In math, there’s a procedure called the “sanity check” in which, essentially, you zoom out and see whether the calculations you’re doing align with your common sense.
We can do a similar gut check on the Iowa race by looking at polls from races in other states.
In national House polls, the parties are roughly evenly matched. The FiveThirtyEight aggregate has Democrats leading Republicans by less than a point, and the RealClearPolitics average has the GOP barely ahead. In Senate polls, the picture is similar: The same purple states that were competitive in 2022 are competitive again.
But there’s an even better sanity check available here, a race wherein the same pollster and almost certainly the same polled citizens are tested in a different way. That’s the Iowa Governor’s race. Let’s take Byler’s assumption that Iowa is reliably conservative, an assumption that is itself somewhat dubious. If true, then we should assume that a flawed Selzer survey should show similar results.
Does it?
No. Incumbent Governor Reynolds, another Republican, has a 17 point lead.
This suggests that the survey has a very good chance of properly representing the political makeup of Iowa. Byler tried to justify his position by gesturing to other states, to other parts of the country, but that approach to political analysis is flawed, because politics is local, local, local. Yes, polarization has gotten worse, but politics is often focused, quite properly, on the particular. Flawed candidates in other parts of the country are thought to be in trouble, and that may be one of the few constants across the country: from Perdue to Loeffler to Walker to Majewski in Ohio, if you’re flawed, inarguably flawed, your constituents may decide to vote for someone else, or no one at all. Indeed, one might observe that the toxic team politics of the GOP is an attempt to mask off incompetency in favor of blind loyalties.
So don’t count Franken out. The counting of the votes in Iowa may be a nail biting affair; that’s what the survey’s Reynold’s result has to say about the Senate race.
I figure, after Senator Lee’s (R) likely upset in Utah, Senator Grassley is the most likely unexpected disaster.
