Be Wary of Today's Polls and Prognosticators for the 2014 Midterm Elections

The polls and prognosticators give the Republicans a high probability of winning control of the Senate in November, as well as gaining House seats. The Republicans need a net gain of six. The consensus is that they have three of the six in hand: Montana, South Dakota, and West Virginia. The consensus and polls currently favor the Republican candidates in Alaska, Arkansas, Iowa, and Louisiana, with Colorado and New Hampshire in reach. The optimal outcome for Republicans would be to sweep these states while salivating in Michigan and Minnesota, and holding on to Republican seats in Georgia, Kansas, and Kentucky. Don’t trust the polls, or my predictions, which are notoriously unreliable. The most accurate polls are at the ballot box on election days, absent voter fraud. The polls can usually measure the sentiment of voters at the time they are taken. They do not accurately measure though the effect of early voting, such as absentee voting. Nor do they predict election day turnout or early voting. Polling is irrelevant for those who voted earlier, but would later wish to change heir votes. The Republicans thought they had a good ground game in 2012 to get out the vote. The Democrats knew they did. The Obama Campaign relied on data mining to predict individual votes and get them to the polls, such as with early voting. The President at the top of the ticket pulled in scores of Democratic candidates down the ticket. The Democrats got their supporters, such as students, to fill in their ballots in advance and then mail them in. The National GOP claims to have learnt the lessons of 2012. The Democrats claim to be applying the 2012 techniques to state elections. November will decide. The Republicans pioneered early voting in the form of absentee ballots. Senator John Fitzgerald Kennedy defeated Vice President Richard Nixon in the 1960 Presidential Election. The initial ballot count showed JFK winning California, but the final tally of absentee ballots decided the state for the Vice President. The Democrats have jumped ahead of the Republicans in all form of of early voting. The next factor on the Democrats’ side is their large advantage in fundraising. We can decry the President’s extensive fundraising, but he is the Presidential fund raiser par excellence. He held 49 campaign fundraisers this year through mid-September. We can question his competence and judgment in many areas; we don’t know his golf scores, SAT, LSAT, or academic record, but he has excelled in trolling for dollars for Democrats. Thus, both the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (the House) and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee are flush with cash, substantially out raising their Republican counterparts, the House Committee by $32.6 million and the Senate Committee by almost $30 million. The effect of the funding differential is currently seen in the North Carolina Senatorial Campaign. Democratic incumbent Kay Hagan should be in trouble, but her campaign and supporters have spent millions in recent ads, but the Republicans have held back. If you want my eternally optimistic predictions, Republicans will gain 10 Democratic Senate seats, and lose none of their own. They will regain many of the House seats they lost in 2012 and end up with a new gain of 12 in the House. They will gain the Colorado governorship, but lose in Pennsylvania. If you want to make money in the stock market, find out what I am planning to but (which is not often), and then sell short.