Nate Silver: Polls Increasingly Point To Republican Senate Win

Nate Silver has an update:

By this point in an election year, when polls are coming in by the bucketload late in the evening, you can get a sense for which pollsters are taking fresh samples of public opinion and which are herding toward the conventional wisdom.

J. Ann Selzer, whose firm Selzer & Company conducts the Des Moines Register’s Iowa Poll, is in the former group: She’s always been one to trust what her data is telling her. On Dec. 31, 2007, Selzer’s poll was among the first to show a large lead for Barack Obama in the Iowa Democratic caucuses — most other polls had a small edge for Hillary Clinton. But Selzer’s poll proved to almost exactly match Obama’s margin in the caucuses four days later.

In September this year, Selzer’s poll showed a 6 percentage-point lead for the Republican Joni Enrst in the Iowa Senate race, defying others that had shown the race as a tossup. Although an early October Selzer poll showed the Democrat Bruce Braley narrowing his deficit to just 1 point, the final Des Moines Register poll, released Saturday night, has Ernst up 51-44 — a 7-point advantage. Other polls of Iowa show Ernst ahead, on average, by a percentage point or two.

Predictions.