Let the Polling Begin: With 1 Year Until Governor’s Election, Pundits Weigh In

ON NOVEMBER 8th, Huff Post Politics writer Ashley Woods posted a piece titled, “Michigan Governor Poll Shows Close Race Between Rick Snyder, Mark Schauer.” In her piece Woods writes, “The contest for Michigan’s governor’s race may be closer than previously anticipated, according to a new poll.” She goes on to report about a poll done by Inside Michigan Politics, a newsletter recently purchased by Susan J. Demas.

Woods writes, “While many polls this fall have given Gov. Rick Snyder (R) an eight-to-10 point lead over his presumed Democratic challenger, former Rep. Mark Schauer, new numbers from Inside Michigan Politics (IMP) suggest that neither candidate leads the race. IMP, a subscription-based statewide political newsletter, commissioned their own poll using both Republican and Democrat pollsters from Michigan, the Republican-affiliated Revsix of Pontiac, Mich. and Michigan Blueprint Strategies, a Democratic polling company in Lansing.”

The same day, the wonkish politics site PolicyMic singled out Michigan’s match-up between Schauer and Snyder as one to watch. Frank Hagler writes, “Florida, Pennsylvania, and Michigan are three states worth watching because: 1) Obama won each state in 2008 and 2012; 2) The elected governors ran on decidedly conservative platforms that have proved to be unpopular; 3) Backlash against the Republican governors attempts to suppress voter turnout; failure to take measures to address the uninsured in their states and an assault on collective bargaining rights will generate a technologically superior get out the vote movement among the coalition of voters that re-elected Obama and sealed a victory for McAuliffe in Virginia. That should be enough to cause each of them to flip in 2014.”

On November 15, The Washington Post came out with a list of the top 15 gubernatorial races to watch in the United States. Writers Sean Sullivan and Aaron Blake put Michigan’s contest at number 6 in the nation. They write: “The GOP is defending 22 seats, compared to just 14 for Democrats. More than half the seats on our list below are controlled by the GOP, including six of the top eight races most likely to flip party control and three of the top four.”

At number six, Sullivan and Blake consider it a good bet that Schauer will unseat Snyder.

Then, on November 20th, The Detroit News came out with a piece titled, “Poll: Snyder extends lead over Schauer in Michigan governor’s race.” In that article, Chad Livengood writes, “With the 2014 election less than a year away, Gov. Rick Snyder’s lead over Mark Schauer has widened as his likely Democratic challenger struggles to be recognized, according to a new poll released exclusively to The Detroit News.

The Republican governor led 44.5 percent to Schauer’s 31 percent in a statewide poll last week of 600 likely voters commissioned by the bipartisan public relations firm Lambert, Edwards & Associates. In July, the firm’s pollster, Denno Research, found Snyder had a 6 percentage-point lead over Schauer, a former Battle Creek congressman.”

Nate Silver, the 30-something political savant who accurately predicted in his New York Times blog how every state would go in the 2012 presidential election, has said this about the Snyder-Schauer race: “Governor Rick Snyder is one of several Republican governors helped by favorable political winds in 2010 that no longer blow so hard.

Snyder’s approval rating hovers around the mid-40s, but he holds a double digit lead against former Democratic congressman Mark Schauer.”

Silver noted that the Michigan race is important for the GOP, and that Snyder is the most vulnerable of a trifecta of Midwestern Republicans, along with Scott Walker of Wisconsin and John Kasich of Ohio, elected in 2010.

The Cook Political Report and Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball have changed their projection as to whether Mark Schauer will successfully oust Governor Rick Snyder from “lean Republican” to “toss-up.”