If the 2014 mid-term elections constituted a wave election, new findings via a survey from the Public Religion Research Institute indicate Democrats may have just barely avoided being hit by a tsunami that could have given the GOP additional senate seats in Virginia and New Hampshire, yielding a 10 or 11 seat gain, as opposed to nine.
In essence, there appears to have been something of a trend among late deciders to have gone for the Democrat is certain races in percentages slightly better than for early deciders. Had those late deciders broke more along the lines of early deciders, the Democrats losses could have been even more significant.
The poll shows that 19 percent of Republican voters made up their minds in the final week of the campaign. By comparison, nearly one-third — 31 percent — of Democratic voters say they decided in the final seven days of the campaign (including 10 percent on Election Day).
To put that in perspective, consider that the generic ballot favored Republicans 52 to 47. If you extrapolate those late-deciders onto those numbers, around 10 percentage points worth of the GOP’s 52 percent of voters would have decided to vote Republican in the closing days, while 14.5 points of the Democrats’ 47 percent held out that long — including about five points until the final day.
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