Walker hasn't caught Evers. The Marquette Poll just had a "red shift"

I could discuss the recently-released NBC/Marist Poll which shows Tony Evers up between 8 and 10 points on Scott Walker in the Governor's race. But that poll's consistently been on the positive side for Dems (it was Evers +13), and I don't want to get overconfident or relaxed.

But what it did do is counteract a result from the Charles Franklin at the Marquette Law School which showed Walker up 1 point on Evers, and I wanted to go into what was up with the Bradley Foundation Internal Marquette Poll. That was quite a change from their previous poll in September, which had Evers up by 4 points

So is Walker gaining and has the race changed? Not really, and one look inside of the likely voter crosstabs of both the October and September Marquette Polls give the real reason why the totals shifted.

Party ID with Leaners – likely voters
September Marquette Poll (Evers +4)
Dem 47.1%
GOP 45.9%
Indy 7.0%

October Marquette Poll (Walker +1)
Dem 44.9% (-2.2%)
GOP 47.6% (+1.7%, GOP +3.9% net change)
Indy/Other 7.5%

The slanting of the electorate to the GOP is 80% of the explanation right there. So if the electorate hasn’t changed from the D +1 we had in September (and that’s being nice to the GOP, given that an increasing amount of people aren’t identifying as Republican in 2018), this would translate into a small Evers lead.

The October poll slanted even more to the right when we look at the ideology of Charles Franklin’s universe of “likely voters”.

Ideology
September Marquette Poll
Conservative/Very Conservative 38.8%
Moderate 30.8%
Liberal/ Very liberal 29.5%
Don’t Know/Refused 1.1%

October Marquette Poll
Conservative/Very Conservative 43.4% (+4.6%)
Moderate 28.3% (-2.5%)
Liberal/ Very Liberal 26.4% (-3.1%)
Don’t Know/Refused 2.0% (+0.9%)

The shift from moderate to conservative in the electorate is of major importance here, because moderates overwhelmingly prefer Evers over Walker.

Moderates, Marquette Law Poll
September
Evers 53-32

October
Evers 56-30

That stat makes the “movement towards Walker” meme all the more absurd. Evers gained 5 points with moderates in the last month. And not to go all “skewed polls” on you, but if the ideological scale in October’s poll was the same as September’s, then Evers would be up 48.6-43.4 – statistically the same as the 47-43 Evers led by in September’s Marquette poll of likely voters.

This makes me all the more suspicious that the Bradleys smashed their fists on Franklin’s scale and said “WHAT WILL IT TAKE TO SHOW WALKER LEADING?” Know why else I suspect Chucky Franklin put on some “weighting”? Because demographics with 10 people have totals like 53-32, and 6 people with responses total 30-28-42. People don’t give “1/2 responses”, so those numbers are mathematically impossible, and deserve some more explanation.

But despite the frustratingly BS headlines the slanted Marquette Poll gives us, it’s also a very good warning for those of us who are counting on a Blue Wave. If the good guys don’t vote, and if Walker, Schimel and the rest of the GOP are allowed to suppress the vote of Dem-leaning individuals, then Walker could sneak his way into a win.

So let’s overwhelm the deplora-trash at the ballot box on November 6, and prevent the Bradleys’ dream electorate (as created by Charles Franklin) from becoming a reality. In fact, let’s make it a younger, diverse D +6 electorate (like we saw with Obama’s landslide in 2008), which would be the worst nightmare for Scott Walker and his oligarch puppetmasters.