Election Day 2014 is less than three weeks away – and early voting begins in six days – but pollsters still aren’t sure how things are going to shake out, primarily because voters this year generally dislike all of their available options.

That’s on the national level as well as here in North Carolina. Public Policy Polling director Tom Jensen says there’s a general anti-incumbent sentiment – but that’s mitigated by the fact that voters are also opposed to the incumbents’ challengers. Both the Democratic and Republican Parties are having trouble gaining traction with the electorate; third-party candidates are drawing support in many races, but not nearly enough to have a viable chance of winning – only enough to (possibly) sway the vote from one major-party candidate to the other.

What will this mean on Election Night? Jensen says he suspects voters will ultimately hold their collective noses and vote whatever party they’ve supported in the past. PPP’s most recent surveys focused on two conservative states, Idaho and Kansas, where Republican incumbents are in surprisingly close races – but Jensen says those incumbents are building slightly more comfortable leads (or pulling closer to the lead, in Kansas) as GOP-leaning voters are falling back in their camps. The same goes, he says, for reliably Democratic states like Massachusetts, where Democratic incumbents too are slowly pulling away in surprisingly close races.

See the latest PPP survey from Idaho…

…and the latest numbers from Kansas.

In North Carolina, Jensen says the race for U.S. Senate is still a toss-up: Democratic incumbent Kay Hagan still holds a very slight lead, but Republican challenger Thom Tillis appears to have closed the narrow gap by a point or two in recent weeks. (Jensen says he doesn’t think the current flap over same-sex marriage will move the dial much: red-meat conservatives may be motivated by Tillis’s continued defense of the state’s now-defunct gay-marriage ban, he says, but just as many moderates will be turned off by it.)

As for the race for General Assembly, Jensen says Democrats are almost certainly going to gain seats in the North Carolina House and Senate – but not nearly enough to overcome the GOP’s enormous majority. At best, Jensen says, Democrats might be able to win enough seats to deny Republicans a veto-proof majority – which could be significant if there’s a split between House and Senate Republicans and Governor Pat McCrory (who campaigned as a moderate).

Tom Jensen spoke with Aaron Keck on WCHL Friday.

 

So after all that, what do voters want? Jensen says there does seem to be something of a consensus, with Americans embracing a mix of some liberal and some conservative positions. (A majority of Americans oppose Obamacare, for instance, but support Medicaid expansion and an increased minimum wage.) But that particular blend of views doesn’t have a home in either party’s platform.