Fishiness in the YouGov longitudinal survey

First things first: Kansas's Republican primary for the U.S. Senate seat there came out as expected, with incumbent Sen. Pat Roberts doing a little worse than polling predicted, although still coming out on top, 7 points ahead of runner-up Milton R. Wolf. So that's done. Kansas's Senate seat therefore remains SAFE REPUBLICAN for the general election in November, despite Democratic nominee Chad Taylor's surprisingly close performance in some polls.

Then there's the recent YouGov longitudinal survey conducted for CBS News and The New York Times, which I described as a "pollgasm"--there's just a ton of data in here. Importantly, I call it a "longitudinal survey" because its ambitious intent--as if polling a panel of 100,000 registered voters nationwide wasn't ambitious enough--is to track changes in opinion from that exact panel every month until the election. Since, for example, I participated in the panel as a voter from New Jersey, my understanding is that I'll be getting an email in a few weeks to ask me the exact same questions--whether I'll be voting for Sen. Cory Booker or Republican challenger Jeff Bell; whether I'll vote for the Democrat or the Republican running for Congress in my district (Aimee Belgard and Tom MacArthur, respectively, although YouGov doesn't know that); whether I approve or disapprove of President Obama's job performance, etc. And again in September, and ostensibly in October, too.

Close-Up: The Quirks of "Red" Alaska

Alaska, to put it bluntly, is political backwater. Despite a spike in media attention to Alaska during former Gov. Sarah Palin's stint as the Republican nominee for vice president, commentators have given little coverage to elections in Alaska because at least in presidential elections, the result is a foregone conclusion: the Republican presidential nominee carried the state by double-digit margins in every election since 1996. National political campaigns simply don't reach Alaska, and for good reason--while Vice President Richard Nixon was in Alaska making good on his promise of a fifty-state campaign back in 1960, Sen. John F. Kennedy was busy campaigning in large swing states like Illinois and New Jersey. Guess who won that one.

Nevertheless, the politics of the Last Frontier are so wildly different from the rest of the country that we don't believe throwing it in the column of "red states" does it justice. A certain late-night live comedy show parodied Gov. Sarah Palin's use of the word "maverick" back in 2008: