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As Democrats prospects for the midterms have improved theyre now up to a 71 percent chance of keeping the Senate and a 29 percent chance of retaining the House, according to the 2022 FiveThirtyEight midterm election forecast Ive observed a corresponding increase in concern among liberals that the polls might overestimate Democrats position again, as they did in 2016 and 2020. Even among commenters who are analyzing the race from an arms-length distance, there sometimes seems to be a presumption that the polls will be biased toward Democrats.

The best version of this argument comes from Other Nate (Nate Cohn, of The New York Times). He pointed out in a piece on Monday that states such as Wisconsin and Ohio where Democratic Senate candidates are outperforming FiveThirtyEights fundamentals index like how the state has voted in other recent elections were also prone to significant polling errors in 2020. Cohns analysis is worth reading in full.

Here, Im going to present something of a rebuttal. Not necessarily to Cohns specific claims, but rather to the presumption I often see in discussion about polling that polling bias is predictable and necessarily favors Democrats. My contention is that while the polls could have another bad year, its hard to know right now whether that bias will benefit Democrats or Republicans. Peoples guesses about this are often wrong. In 2014, for example, there was a lot of discussion about whether the polls would have a pro-Republican bias, as they did in 2012. But they turned out to have a pro-Democratic bias instead.

Theres one important complication to this, however. Our model actually assumes that current polling probably does overstate the case for Democrats. Its just not necessarily for the reasons people assume.

As I mentioned, the Deluxe version of our forecast gives Democrats a 71 percent and 29 percent chance of keeping the Senate and House, respectively. But the Deluxe forecast isnt just based on polls: It incorporates the fundamentals I mentioned earlier, along with expert ratings about these races. Furthermore, it accounts for the historical tendency of the presidents party to perform poorly at the midterms, President Bidens mediocre (although improving) approval rating and the fact that Democrats may not perform as well in polls of likely voters as among registered voters. As the election approaches, it tends to put more weight on the polls and less on these other factors, but it never zeros them out completely. (In this respect, it differs from our presidential forecast.)

By contrast, the Lite version of our forecast, which is more or less a polls-only view of the race, gives Democrats an 81 percent chance of keeping the Senate and a 41 percent chance of keeping the House. It also suggests that theyll win somewhat more seats: There are 52.4 Democratic Senate seats in an average Lite simulation as compared with 50.8 in a Deluxe simulation, or 212 Democratic House seats in an average Lite simulation versus 209 in a Deluxe simulation. Notably, this corresponds to current polls overstating Democrats position by the equivalent of 1.5 or 2 percentage points. Put another way, we should think of a race in which the polling average shows Democrats 2 points ahead as being tied.

Thats not quite the same thing as saying that the polls are systematically biased, though. Polls reflect a snapshot of what is happening today, and Democrats might indeed do very well if the election were held now instead of in November. In states like Ohio, for instance, theyve enjoyed a significant advertising advantage thanks to superior fundraising, but that will probably even out to some extent by Election Day.

Meanwhile, Biden and Democrats have also been on something of a winning streak lately, between a series of policy accomplishments, inflation trending downward and the political backlash to the Supreme Courts unpopular decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. But a worse-than-expected inflation report this week and a narrowly averted rail workers strike, which could have caused substantial supply chain disruptions, are reminders that uncertain real-world events wont necessarily continue to play out in Democrats favor.

Its also the case that in individual races, information besides the polls can help make a more accurate prediction, even when you have a lot of polls. For example, the partisan lean of a state still tells you something. Lets say the polling average has the Democrat ahead by 10 points in a state where the fundamentals put the Republican up by 2. Empirically, the best forecast in a race like this uses a blend of mostly polls and some fundamentals (exactly how much weight is given to the polls depends on how many polls there are and how close it is to the election). And you might end up with a forecast that has the Democrat winning by 7 or 8 points rather than 10 points, for instance. In that sense, in races such as Wisconsin and Ohio where there is a significant divergence between polls and fundamentals, Democrats probably should have concerns.

What I resist, though, is the implication that it can be presumed that the polls have a predictable, persistent, systematic bias toward Democrats. Is Rep. Tim Ryan going to underperform his current polls in Ohios Senate race? Well see, but more likely than not, the answer is yes. But is it just a thing now that polls always overrate Democrats?

Im skeptical. Here are seven reasons why:

Our historical database of polls shows that theres not much in the way of consistent polling bias. Two cycles of a pro-Republican bias in 1998 and 2000 were followed by a Democratic bias in 2002. A fairly sharp Republican bias in 2012 reversed itself, and the polls were biased toward Democrats in both 2014 and 2016.

Weighted-average statistical bias in polls in final 21 days of thecampaign

Bias is calculated only for races in which the top two finishers are a Democrat and a Republican. Therefore, it is not calculated for presidential primaries. Pollsters that are banned by FiveThirtyEight are not included in the averages. So as not to give a more prolific pollster too much influence over the average, polls are weighted by one over the square root of the number of polls each pollster conducted in a specific category.

Historically, the correlation between the polling bias in a given cycle and the bias in the previous cycle is either essentially zero or slightly negative, depending on whether you define previous cycle as two years ago or four years ago.

Pollsters get a lot of crap from people, but one nice thing about their job is that they regularly get to compare their results against reality. Sure, its possible for a pollster to get unlucky because of sampling error if you survey 500 people, sometimes youll draw a sample showing the Republican winning even if the Democrat is really up by 5 points. For the most part, though, pollsters can and do consider changes to their methodology based on errors in past elections.

And precisely because pollsters are subject to public scrutiny and there are relatively objective ways to measure their performance, they have strong financial and professional incentives to scrutinize their methods for potential sources of error and fix them if they can. Its the same incentive that a professional golfer has to fix his swing: If hes consistently hitting every shot to the left side of the fairway, for instance, at some point hell make adjustments. Maybe hell even overcompensate and start hitting everything to the right side instead.

Even if pollsters dont change their methods, the market will change the polling landscape on its own, at least to some degree. Pollsters who performed well in previous elections will get more business, and those who performed poorly will lose it.

For instance, weve seen relatively few traditional gold standard polls sponsored by major media organizations this cycle, perhaps because those polls tended to have a Democratic bias in 2020. Thats a shame, because most of these polling organizations have good long-term track records despite some recent problems. But it does mean that polling averages are more weighted toward Republican-leaning firms that have done comparatively well in recent election cycles, such as Rasmussen Reports and Trafalgar Group. This is especially true for FiveThirtyEights polling averages, which weight polls in part based on their historical accuracy. Groups like Rasmussen, for instance, get more say in the polling average than they did in 2020 because their rating is now higher.

As you can see in the table in the first point, polls did not have a systematic Democratic bias in 2018. That seems relevant, considering that was the most recent midterm.

Polls have also generally not had a Democratic bias in other elections in the Trump era when Trump himself was not on the ballot. They didnt have one in the Alabama Senate special election in 2017, for instance, or the Georgia Senate runoffs in January 2021, or in last years Virginia gubernatorial race.

There have also been some races where Democrats have overperformed their polls, such as in last years California gubernatorial recall election and in the 2017 governors race in Virginia. But these errors dont tend to get as much attention from the media as those that underestimated Republicans.

It may be that Republicans benefit from higher turnout only when Trump himself is on the ballot. A certain number of voters were willing to walk over glass to vote for Trump: Would they do the same for J.D. Vance, Mehmet Oz, Ron Johnson or Blake Masters? Evidence from non-Trump elections in the Trump era suggests maybe not. I tend not to buy the so-called shy Trump theory, or that voters are reluctant to state their preference for Trump. But it may nonetheless be hard to reach Trump voters, who may be more socially isolated, or who may be irregular voters who are screened out by likely voter models.

Democrats have had a lot of success in elections since the Supreme Courts Dobbs decision and importantly for our purposes, theyve done as well or better than polls predicted in these races:

I couldnt find any polls for the special elections in New Yorks 23rd Congressional District or Nebrakas 1st Congressional District, also held since the Dobbs decision.

Ironically, polls conducted before large parts of the country were shut down in March 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic were more accurate than those conducted immediately before Election Day in 2020. Take the FiveThirtyEight polling average on March 1, 2020. It showed Biden up by 4.1 percentage points nationally, very close to his eventual 4.5-point popular vote margin. Our polling averages also correctly showed a very close race in states such as Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

This may be because the pandemic profoundly affected who answered the polls. Specifically, Democrats were more likely to be in jurisdictions that implemented stay-at-home orders, and liberals were otherwise more likely to voluntarily limit their social interactions. Having more time at home on their hands, they may have been more likely to respond to polls. Thats less of a concern this year, with few voters treating COVID-19 as a high priority and few government restrictions in place.

Elections have consequences, and theyre relatively infrequent events. So the second-guessing and recriminations tend to linger for a while.

But that doesnt change the fact that peoples concerns about the polls stem mostly from a sample of exactly two elections, 2020 and 2016. You can point out that polls also had a Democratic bias in 2014. But, of course, they had a Republican bias in 2012, were largely unbiased in 2018, and have either tended to be unbiased or had a Republican bias in recent special elections.

True, in 2020 and 2016, polls were off the mark in a large number of races and states. But the whole notion of a systematic polling error is that its, well, systematic: It affects nearly all races, or at least the large majority of them. There just isnt a meaningful sample size to work with here, or anything close to it.

Again, that doesnt mean you should expect the polls to be spot-on. It may be that were living in a universe with larger polling errors than before in response to declining response rates. And there are some decent reasons to suspect that Democrats wont perform as well in November as they would in an election right now. Still, Ill stick to my usual advice: Prepare for the polls to be wrong in either direction.

See the original post:
Will The Polls Overestimate Democrats Again? - FiveThirtyEight

In an awkward lack of self-awareness, the Trib co-dependently enables Westmoreland Democrat election concerns regarding a vandalized yard sign of all things (Westmoreland Democrats say concerns abound as November election nears, Sept. 8, TribLIVE). I dont condone the vandalism, but Ill pass on the fainting couch routine over Democrats feeling endangered by Republican violence.

Heres some critically missing perspective.

For arguments sake, ignore the antifa and BLM riot violence over the past few years and recent attacks on pregnancy centers. Also ignore John Roske who, fully armed, was stopped from assassinating Justice Brett Kavanaugh at his home with intent to target other members of the Supreme Court. Ignore if you can California Rep. Maxine Waters commanding a crowd to get in the faces of Republicans.

Ill even ignore James Hodgkinson. Hes the Sen. Bernie Sanders campaign worker who gunned down five Republicans, nearly killing Louisiana Rep. Steve Scalise. They were playing baseball, and our ever-so-trustworthy FBI ruled it suicide by cop? Cmon man, its no joke!

Other news that day was the CMU professor of ethnic multilingualism who unapologetically wished excruciating pain on the dying Queen Elizabeth. Apparently her politics prevent her from comprehending the depravity of this in any language.

Finally, theres the cautionary tale for reporters out of Las Vegas, where journalist Jeff German was stabbed to death at his home. As your AP article Police raid elected officials home in Vegas investigative reporter death (Sept. 7, TribLIVE) noted, a disgraced local Democratic official was arrested for his murder.

Perhaps what Democrats really fear is Republican victories?

Joe Schmidt

Lower Burrell

See original here:
Letter to the editor: Violence comes from Democrats, too - TribLIVE

President Biden will travel to Florida later this month to rally with Democrats, with leading Senate and gubernatorial races on the ballot there in November.

Biden will travel to Orlando on Sept. 27, the White House announced Friday. He will attend a Democratic National Committee rally while there, the latest instance of Biden addressing a gathering of Democrats ahead of the midterms.

It will mark Bidens second trip to the state as president. He previously visited to tour the site of the Surfside Condo collapse.

Biden has held recent events in Maryland, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania to boost Democrats, though not every member of the party on the ticket in November has opted to appear alongside him.

In Florida, where Biden lost in 2020 by nearly 400,000 votes in part due to an erosion of support among Hispanic voters, Democrats are hoping to win up and down the ticket.

Rep. Val Demings (D) is running against Sen. Marco Rubio (R), while former Rep. Charlie Crist (D), the onetime governor of the state, is running against Gov. Ron DeSantis (R).

Polls show Republicans ahead in both races, but Democrats believe that momentum from the Supreme Court decision to strike down Roe v. Wade, as well as DeSantiss growing and controversial national profile, could help them pull an upset.

DeSantis made headlines in recent days by flying a group of migrants to Marthas Vineyard in Massachusetts, which the White House decried as a cruel political stunt.

Excerpt from:
Biden to rally with Democrats in Florida this month - The Hill

The Democrats' chances of winning both the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives in November's midterm elections are improving, based on an analysis by national poll tracker FiveThirtyEight.

President Joe Biden's party is currently favored to win the Senate, while Republicans are favored to win the House, but the Democrats appear to be picking up momentum.

FiveThirtyEight said the GOP's chances of taking the House were 72 percent as of Thursday compared to the Democrats' 28 percent. However, those figures represent a movement toward the Democrats.

On September 2, the same analysis gave Republicans 75 percent chance of taking the House, while Democrats had 25 percent, a move of three points in two weeks.

Republicans are facing a bleaker picture in the Senate, where FiveThirtyEight's analysis shows Democrats with a 71 percent chance of taking the chamber compared to the GOP's 29 percent.

On September 2, the same analysis showed Democrats with just 68 chances in 100 of taking the Senate and Republicans with 32 chances in 100. FiveThirtyEight's model now rates Democrats as "favored" to win the Senate but they were previously only "slightly favored" to do so.

The poll tracker includes data from a wide variety of pollsters and assigns each one a rating using its own system to arrive at its final figures.

The Democrats' position in the upcoming midterms has been steadily improving despite the fact the incumbent president's party generally performs poorly in midterm election years and Biden's approval ratings have been low.

The president's approval rating has been rising in recent weeks, however, with Biden's approval standing at 42.3 percent as of Thursday based on FiveThirtyEight's tracker. His disapproval rating was 53.1 percent.

With less than two months until the midterms, it remains to be seen if Democrats can pick up enough momentum to keep control of the House and the Senate. If they can do so, it would be a significant victory.

The last time neither chamber of Congress changed hands was in the 1998 midterms when Republicans retained the House and Senate despite modest Democratic gains in the House. The composition of the Senate also changed slightly.

It's worth noting that the 1998 midterms were considered a disappointment for Republicans at the time as the party had hoped to make gains following major victories in 1994.

It's difficult to speculate about why Democrats' chances are improving and the current polls may not be borne out in November but recent legislative victories such as the Inflation Reduction Act and concerns about abortion rights could be part of the apparent shift.

The Inflation Reduction Act, which Biden signed into law on August 16, is seen as reviving his Build Back Better agenda, which had stalled earlier his presidency, while the U.S. Supreme Court's decision to overturn the landmark 1973 abortion ruling Roe v. Wade may be cause for concern for Republican candidates if voters prove to be motivated by the ruling.

More here:
Democrats' Chances of Keeping Both House and Senate Are Improving: Polls - Newsweek

The two parties arent on the same page about what they should even be debating. Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photos: Getty Images

In the gospel according to the Church of Bipartisanship, the way politics should work is that each side should devise distinctive solutions to commonly identified problems and then compromise where necessary to get things done. If that doesnt happen, the blame is typically assigned to self-serving politicians and fanatical activists who prefer gridlock to any accommodation of divergent views. And that is bad!

Reality is more complicated. In part, thats because the real engines of gridlock are the institutional obstacles (especially the Senate filibuster and judicial review) available to minority parties to obstruct anything they dont want to happen. Beyond that fundamental problem, moreover, is a flawed premise at the heart of the bipartisan proposition: The parties often dont agree on any commonly identified problems. Indeed, as Ron Brownstein explains, thats why Democrats and Republicans appear to be talking past each other in this years midterm-election chatter:

As the Democratic pollster Molly Murphy told me, 2022 is not an election year when most Americans agree on what the top priorities [for the country] are and debate different solutions from the two major parties. Instead, surveys show that Republican voters stress inflation, the overall condition of the economy, crime, and immigration. For Democratic voters, the top priorities are abortion rights, the threats to democracy created by former President Donald Trump and his movement, gun control, climate change, and health care.

Now this is not, of course, an entirely unprecedented phenomenon. Ever since polling and focus groups were invented, politicians have understood there are certain issues that favor or disfavor their own parties. For ages, Republicans have struggled to maintain credibility on fundamental fairness, maintenance of an adequate social safety net, and sensitivity to the needs of minorities, while Democrats arent really trusted to keep government efficient, attend to national security needs, or protect traditional moral values. Ceding whole areas to the opposition unfortunately tends to reinforce such stereotypes, which in turn makes loud shouting the way to elevate the issues one owns.

In living memory, some of the more innovative politicians in both parties have refused to play this game of ownership and instead sought to capture, or at least neutralize, the other partys issues with distinctive policies of their own. Most famously, Bill Clinton, to the great dismay of Republicans and quite a few people in his own party, insisted on offering proposals aimed at reducing crime (e.g., community policing and deploying more officers on the streets), reforming welfare (originally a work-based proposal that maintained a personal entitlement to assistance), and reinventing government. Yes, Clinton, whose party did not control either chamber of Congress for six of his eight years in office, ultimately went too far in accommodating Republican policies on both crime and welfare reform (thus exposing him to the charge of triangulating against his own party). But the basic idea of offering Democratic proposals on public concerns outside the partys comfort zone was smart, and it drove Republicans, who constantly complained that Clinton was stealing our issues, absolutely crazy.

Similarly, George W. Bush, on the advice of strategist Karl Rove, spent much of his first term offering modest but significant proposals on health care (a Medicare prescription-drug benefit), education (the No Child Left Behind Act), and immigration (a comprehensive reform measure) all issues Democrats were generally thought to own. Like Clinton, he paid a price among party activists for RINO efforts to address Democrat issues. Arguably, the conservative backlash to his perceived heresies, especially on immigration, fed both the tea-party movement and its descendent, the MAGA movement, though Bush himself was clearly undone by the Iraq War and his inept reaction to a financial crisis. But the impulse to build credibility on salient public concerns where none existed was wise, and it was even in some minor respects emulated by Donald J. Trump (e.g., in his effort to co-opt criminal-justice reform via the Jared Kushnerbrokered First Step Act).

Is anything like this kind of mold-breaking occurring at present? To some extent, Democrats have tried to address Republican issues involving the economy. Certainly, Joe Biden and congressional Democrats have spent much of 2021 and 2022 touting their budget proposals as essential to the task of building a strong economy. And while Joe Manchin might have been principally responsible for branding the fiscal year 2022 budget-reconciliation bill as an Inflation Reduction Act, by the time Biden signed the legislation, it had come to seem like a very good idea to most Democrats. The party has been less resolute in dealing with the crime issue, other than by constantly trying to rebut made-up claims that it wants to defund the police as part of an orgy of wokeness.

Republicans, perhaps because they thought they had a surefire winning message in 2022 and are loath to depart from it, have been less adept in adjusting to shifting public concerns that undermine their position. They justifiably think of abortion as a Democrat issue right now one that threatens to boost Democratic turnout while flipping many suburban swing voters and when Lindsey Graham tried to offer a proposal to reposition them on stronger ground, the reaction among Republicans was overwhelmingly negative, as the Washington Post reported:

In a memo to GOP campaigns released this week, the Republican National Committee laid out what it called a winning message on abortion: Press Democrats on where they stand on the procedure later in pregnancy, seek common ground on exceptions to bans and keep the focus on crime and the economy. Then, Senator Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.)introducedlegislation to ban abortions nationwide after 15 weeks of pregnancy overshadowing new inflation numbers and undermining what many GOP strategists see as their best message for the fall: Leave it to the states.

Its an absolute disaster, GOP strategist John Thomas said, as Republican Senate nominees already targeted for their comments on abortion were asked to weigh in. Oy vey, he said when informed that Blake Masters in battleground state Arizona had just expressed his support.

Even if Republicans succeed in making inflation or crime or border control more salient than abortion among 2022 voters, they will pay a price down the road among voters generally and in their powerfully anti-abortion base by running for the hills when an issue is raised thats not going to go away in the foreseeable future. Maybe someday the two parties can get onto the same page when it comes to the menu of national problems they intend to address. But dont hold your breath.

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Read the original:
Democrats and Republicans Aren't Even Talking About the Same Issues This Year - New York Magazine