Voters in Alaska are set to play a decisive role in the control of the US Senate, with the race between Democrat Mark Begich and Republican Dan Sullivan too close to call. Get-out-the-vote efforts are likely to be of great importance, yet the outcome is difficult to predict due to the state’s small population and high levels of mobility.
Recent polls have shifted the Meta-Margin towards Republicans, yet the closeness of the race and the state’s small population mean that pollsters have had to reach nearly one in three Alaskan voters in order to get an accurate picture. This is an unusually high fraction for a political opinion survey.
Adding to the difficulty of forecasting the result is the fact that many of Alaska’s voters are relatively recent arrivals. For example, Sullivan himself moved to Alaska in 1997 and has only lived in the state for eight of the last seventeen years. This has been highlighted by Begich’s campaign, which has been entitled “True Alaska“. In total, over 340,000 people have moved to Alaska between 2000 and 2011, while over 320,000 have left the state during the same period.
Given these complexities, the outcome of the Alaska Senate race is far from certain. The result could be pivotal in determining which party controls the Senate, making it a race to watch closely in the coming weeks.
Alaska is a state of constant flux, with an estimated 10% of its population arriving or leaving each year. This mobility has been highlighted in the 2010 Nevada Senate election, where polls unanimously showed Republican Sharron Angle favored to unseat Democratic Senator Harry Reid, by a median of four percentage points. Yet Reid won the election by 5 points, outperforming polls by 9 points – a miss that has been described as the worst of the last three election cycles.
What can this tell us about the potential for polling errors in Alaska? The state has a unique geography and demographics, including a large population of seasonal and short-term workers such as oil-industry workers and fishermen, as well as a high percentage of cell-phone-only users. As a result, telephone-based surveys may not capture a fully representative sample of voters.
FiveThirtyEight has suggested that in Alaska, Republicans tend to outperform opinion polls on Election Day, but this does not fully explain why Alaska would be different from other states. To address the mobile-voter problem, pollsters could use Internet-based sampling, which is growing in popularity and has been used in recent polls in Alaska. The results suggest that phone-only surveys are 5.7% better for Begich, although this is hard to interpret due to the partisan-pollster issue.
Alaska voters have a great deal of power to influence Senate control, with individual voters having a tremendous amount of power in terms of influencing the overall probability of Senate control by either party. As a result, Alaskans should be prepared for an influx of Republican and Democratic campaign workers.
