This Tuesday marks the official end of the 2022 midterm primary season, with races across the country set for the November general election. But even as Democrats have spent a week or more spinning a “no red wave coming” message to try to tout their strength and popularity with voters, President Biden’s party is quietly worried that its candidates are … ahead?
These concerns are apparently based on polls showing Democratic candidates ahead of Republican opponents in places where polls showed Hillary Clinton ahead of Trump in 2016 — and we all know how that turned out — as well as polls that in some places wrongly showed Biden ahead in places where he actually did not.
In an attempt to dampen Democratic hopes at The New York Times, chief political analyst Nate Cohn warns that “poll warning lights are flashing again.” Cohn explains how he has found “a consistent link between Democratic strength today and the polling error of two years ago.”
Wisconsin is a case in point. On paper, Republican Senator Ron Johnson should be the favorite to win reelection. FiveThirtyEight’s fundamental index, for example, has him as a two-point favorite. Instead, the polls have exceeded Democrats’ wildest expectations. The gold standard Marquette Law School poll even showed Democrat Mandela Barnes leading Mr. Johnson by seven percentage points.
But in this case, good for Democrats in Wisconsin may be too good to be true. The state was ground zero for polling errors in 2020, when pre-election polls were too good to be true for Mr. Biden. Ultimately, the polls overestimated Mr. Biden by about eight percentage points. Oddly, Mr. Barnes is doing better than expected, by a similar margin.
The Wisconsin data is just one example of a broader pattern in battleground states: The more polls overestimated Mr. Biden last time around, the better Democrats appear to be doing relative to expectations. Conversely, Democrats are posting less impressive results in some states where polls were fairly precise two years ago, like Georgia.
Democrats are doing well in states where polls have been wildly misleading in previous years, but not so well in states where the results have been more precise — leading Democrats to fear they could be setting themselves up for even greater confidence, supposedly leading to a “stunning” defeat on election night.
“If the polls are wrong again, it won’t be hard to explain,” Cohn continued. That’s because “[m]Most pollsters have not made significant changes to their methodology since the last election.
So if the 2022 midterm polls are as off as they were in 2020, what do the Senate battlegrounds really look like? According to Cohn, given the missteps in the last presidential election cycle, “the Democrats’ apparent advantage in Senate races in Wisconsin, North Carolina and Ohio would evaporate.” That means the GOP would only need to win two up for grabs in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona or Nevada to regain control of the Senate.
First entry in the newsletter: warning signals about poll results are flashing again.
Democrats beat expectations in states where polls overestimated Joe Biden in 2020
https://t.co/Kasyy2m0zc photo:twitter.com/Qa8MCMdg0Z— Nate Cohn (@Nate_Cohn) September 12, 2022
