Our colleagues at The Upshot have partnered with Siena College to conduct real-time polling in several of the most competitive races in the country, several of which are in California. They have been reporting the results live, respondent by respondent, as survey calls are being placed. That includes live polls underway in California’s 45th and 48th Congressional Districts, in addition to dozens already completed nationally and in the state’s most competitive districts.
We spoke with Nate Cohn, a correspondent who covers elections, polling and demographics, to ask him about the project and what he has been seeing in California.
Obviously the estimates that we report are the best that we can come up with based on the data at our disposal. But anyone who tells you that they are 100 percent sure what a high-turnout California midterm electorate looks like is lying to you, because there hasn’t been one in a long time and certainly in a Democratic-leaning year. We think we’ve laid as much of that out there as we can.
But in every poll that we have done in Orange County, the Democrats command a very, very, very wide lead with NVP voters. And that’s important for Democrats because in all these districts the Republicans are likely to have a registration advantage, and indeed they have a registration advantage in the early vote so far. They need that to be competitive; it doesn’t assure them a victory, but it’s an important trend.
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