RedState: Tillis needs about 62% of undecideds in order to squeak past Hagan
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hat’s the take from analyst Dan McLaughlin– who finds Tillis sitting with 47% of the two-party vote, and needing 61.9% of the total 15.2% undecided vote in the race to earn 50.01% of the vote in November. From June to October, McLaughlin found Hagan losing 1.1% of her support, but Tillis losing 1.7% of his. Here’s more:
When we last left the Senate races on Friday, the state of the polling was consistent with the theory that undecided voters would break for the GOP due to President Obama’s low approval ratings and the consequent surge for the GOP in the generic ballot, but we had not yet seen enough movement to conclude that this was actually going to happen. .[…]
From June to October, McLaughlin found Hagan losing 1.1% of her support, but Tillis losing 1.7% of his:
As you can see, measured by the change in the leader’s margin in the race, the Republican position improved by at least 1 point in 14 out of 20 races, by at least 2 in 12 out of 20, and by at least 4 in 6 out of 20; the GOP’s position has deteriorated by at least a point in just 3 out of 20 races (including Kansas), and in the one really competitive race that has seen a slight falloff (North Carolina), the Democrat’s position in the polls has gone down, just a little less than the Republican’s (a sign of what a fundamentally weak candidate Thom Tillis is, due mainly to the unpopularity of the GOP state legislature).The overall trendline over these 19 races (an unweighted average) shows a 1-point drop in the Democrats’ polls and a 1.5 point improvement in the Republicans’ since late June. […]
So, Tillis has been under-performing when compared with other GOP candidates nationwide. More: 
Kansas and North Carolina are still looking stubbornly disappointing for the GOP, in good part due to hostile state political environments counterbalancing a positive national environment, and races like New Hampshire and Michigan remain uphill battles. But the polls, the trends and the national fundamentals still favor a significant gain of seats for Republicans in the Senate. What the Democrats are countering with is the advantage of incumbency: a big edge in fundraising and a massive operational push to get out the vote, especially early. That push should be viewed with some skepticism: Republicans in 2006 made all the same noises about Karl Rove (then still viewed with a sort of superstitious awe by a lot of people on both sides) bringing in the GOP’s vaunted ground game. That said, after 2012, many of us are loath to entirely dismiss the Democrats’ edge in money and organization. Time will tell.
This stage of the game involves a lot of the same kind of skills used in closing a sale in business. You’re dealing with a customer who has a relationship with your competitor. How do you convince them to leave the comfort of what they know, for an entity that they don’t know all that well? Typically, you lay out the differences between yourself and the competition, and count on the fact that said differences so impress the customer that they jump over to your side. So far, the challenger and his team have allowed the incumbent to set the agenda for the campaign’s overall debate. They’ve squandered many opportunities sell the public on the GOP’s limited government agenda and to portray the work in Raleigh as a triumph of limited government vs. the federal government’s overreach.
Some could claim the presence of so many fence-sitters at this stage of the game is a victory against the incumbent. So far, though, the challenger’s campaign hasn’t shown a whole lot to WOW these undecideds into coming off of the fence to their side.
I think Tillis could still win and I dont think 62% is that big a number of undecideds to get.
There are a lot of low information voters who wil just vote Republican thinking it is change. Most of these people have no idea how anti-conservative Tillis really is and how pro-amnesty he has been just 1 year ago.
Does this sound like an anti-amnesty hawk?
“The other thing we’re going to do is send a very clear message to Washington that they can make our job a lot easier if they would deal with the issue that they’ve kicked down the road – Republicans and Democrats – for many, many years.”
“The regulatory burden and complexity caused by federal inaction requires us to consider stop-gap measures while we wait for politicians in D.C. to take action,” he said.
If Tillis convincingly had a conversion on the road to Damascus and convincingly shifted to a strong opponent of ANY amnesty for illegal aliens (that means enforcing our immigration laws as written with no ”pathway to citizenship” as Tillis promised the NC Farm Bureau or ”legal status” as he suggested when standing beside the Amnesty Judas Goat Jeb Bush) plus genuinely securing our borders, he could earn my vote in spite of all his other faults. Trying to ride the fence and hide his own real views, however, falls far of the mark. This is just an overridingly important issue, that it trumps all else this election.