Which poll had McCauliffe ahead by 11-12 points before election?

[kentuck]

How realistic was that? Who in their right mind would have thought VA had turned that blue? What were they thinking?

A 3% win was very good for the Democrats. Republicans brought all their big guns into VA to help the Tea Party candidate and they got their butts kicked.

Whatever problems there might have been with the Obamacare website, it was not enough to over-ride the concerns about the extremists that shut down our government.

Make no mistake. This was a big win for the Democrats.

[cali]

1. McAuliffe was up by an aggregate of 7.

That poll was definitely an outlier. Yes, VA was a win for dems- particularly considering who McAuliffe is.

Better the crook than the kook who is also a crook.

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/11/terry-mcauliffe-governor-virginia

[uponit7771]

2. I don't think we're factoring in strong voter suppression efforts by the GOP, I don't believe for a

... second it's a .5 point peele...

The PA GOP head said they had a 5-6 point peel for the state due to suppression efforts

[cthulu2016]

3. Thanks for posting this before the election! Excellent prediction.

[geek tragedy]

4. Rasmussen, which finds new ways to suck. But the polling in general was just plain wrong, badly so.

Maybe 1 public poll got it right. Everything else over predicted McAuliffe. Exit polls sucked too.

[onenote]

5. A win is a win, but 3 percent isn't all that great

Look, defeating Cooch, if only by one vote, would be something to celebrate.

But a 3 percent (really more like 2.5 percent) win against a deeply flawed candidate isn't "very good." As for big guns, McAuliffe had the biggest guns around working for and with him: Clinton, Biden, Obama. Yet he got less than 48 percent of the vote in a year where turnout, contrary to predictions, was higher than it had been the past couple of governor's elections.

It was a marked improvment over the showing of Creigh Deeds, the Democratic nominee for governor in 2009, who lost by more than 17 points, but it was a step back from other recent statewide victories by democrats, including Kaine's pulling in 51.7 percent of the vote in a nearly 6 point win over Jerry Kilgore in 2005 or Warner's 52.2 percent against Mark Early's 47 % in 2001.

The polls got this wrong, but most of the polls had McAuliffe struggling to hit 50 percent. There was a significant "undecided" vote and a third party candidate--factors that almost certainly impacted the accuracy of the polling.

With a better candidate against Cooch, we could have won by totals more comparable to the margins that Warner and Kaine had; on the other hand, if the repubs had nominated a better candidate (Bolling), McAuliffe almost certainly would have lost -- not by a McDonnell/Deeds margin, but by five or six points.