By David Brady, Daniel P. Kessler and Douglas Rivers
The majority party normally loses seats in midterm elections, but the Republican resurgence of recent months suggested more than a conventional midterm rebound. How did an obscure Republican run a competitive Senate campaign in Massachusetts and win? The answer was voter leeriness about health care reform, and Scott Brown’s surprising capture of the late Edward Kennedy’s seat suggested that Democrats will face even worse problems later this year in places less liberal than Massachusetts.
We polled voters in eleven states likely to have competitive Senate races in November on how they felt about health reform and how they might vote in November. The interviews were conducted January 6–11 with 500 registered voters in Arkansas, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Louisiana, Missouri, Nevada, North Dakota, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. The polls were conducted by YouGov using a selected panel of Internet users representative of the registered voters in each state.
