We know that impeached, bunker-cowering, rally-fizzlin’ president Donald Trump is in deep electoral trouble. We know the Republican Senate majority is under serious threat. And we know that no one is worried about the House switching hands. Given Republican fundraising deficit ($191 million to $147 million) and candidate recruitment, as well as their inability to win back the suburban white women who delivered the House to Democrats in 2018, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s majority is safe. In fact, there’s a real possibility that Democrats will expand their majority.
So what do hapless House Republicans do to keep their morale up? They invent the craziest poll to tell the most ridiculous story. It is an actual, real life, fake poll.
Here is the poll from the National Republican Congressional Committee, the campaign arm working to elect Republicans to the U.S. House. It is a poll of 1,014 “swing voters” in “battleground districts.” What’s a “swing voter?” Which “battleground districts?” That’s conveniently not defined, but these polls typically take 20-30 people from various competitive districts and claim to come up with some sort of unified conclusion. These polls are always bunk. Swing voters in rural, urban, and suburban districts don’t look alike. Battleground districts don’t look alike. A swing voter in Texas doesn’t quite look like one in Pennsylvania—you get the picture.
But that’s not the poll’s greatest sin. Far from it.
The overall conclusion, and the one that Republicans are trumpeting, is: “Among swing voters in battleground districts, a generic Republican candidate holds a one-point advantage over a generic Democratic candidate.”
It’s interesting that the poll singles out “swing voters.” If Republicans were winning these supposed battleground districts, they would say: “Democrats hold a 1-point lead in the most competitive House seats,” but they don't. They might as well put out a poll saying that Republicans lead among Trump supporters, or … rural white males. Congrats. But districts are made up of more than one group.
Thus, we don’t know what a “swing voter” is, nor what “battleground districts” they’ve polled, and we definitely don’t know results among all voters in those districts. And you better believe if Republicans were winning them, they would be talking about that instead.
But, like a terrible infomercial, there’s more!
The poll claims: “Voters’ top concern has moved to an area that is strongest for Republicans: the economy. Twenty-three percent (23%) of voters say that the economy and jobs are the most important issues for Congress to focus on, followed by corruption in Washington at 20% and the coronavirus at 10%.”
We’re supposed to believe that there’s a group of voters who think that corruption in Washington is a bigger concern than the coronavirus. Ha ha. Yeah, that person doesn’t exist. There are people who don’t care about the virus and the death and economic devastation it is creating. (Those people are called “Republicans.”) But they don’t care about corruption in Washington, otherwise Trump would’ve been 25th Amendment-ed or impeached a long time ago. And the people who do care about corruption? They’re called “Democrats” and “independents.” Those people do worry about the coronavirus.
But that’s still not the poll’s greatest sin!
You see, we find out that this is a “message testing” poll. This isn’t a straight-up “who do you prefer” type of operation. Rather, these polls test various positive and negative messages and see if any of them move respondents from their initial position. So, for example, if I were running for Congress, the pollster would test nice things about me (“businessman, military vet, devoted father of two, successful immigrant” and other B.S. like that), and then test the obvious Republican attack ads against me (“Salvadoran, hates our troops and said ‘screw them’ once, ultra wacko liberal, supports protesters tearing down our monuments and heritage,” and other true stuff like that, ha ha).
These tests are helpful because if it turns out that being a businessman doesn’t help me, but being an immigrant who served in the Army does, then guess where I’m spending my ad and direct mail dollars? And if I find out that being Salvadoran is a liability because people are racist and xenophobic, then I better come up with a way to mitigate the damage or jiu jitsu it into an advantage.
So this is a message testing poll, and we know that because of stuff like this: “Swing voters still have strong negative reactions to pre-coronavirus pieces of Democratic legislation. Sixty-one percent (61%) of swing voters are strongly less likely to vote for a Democratic member of Congress who supported H.R. 1, which gives up to five million dollars of public funds to campaigns to spend on anything from personal expenses to negative campaign ads.”
Note how all context is stripped from that question. This is what HR 1 does: force presidential candidates to release 10 years of taxes, end partisan gerrymandering, make Election Day a federal holiday, create national voter registration standards, eliminate various forms of voter suppression like voter roll purges, etc. So now you get an idea of how dishonestly they frame these questions. And that one wasn’t even bad. Check out some of the other stuff they claim:
- They claim that Democrats supposedly support a “partisan plan that would require payroll taxes to increase by nearly 20%.”
- They claim Democrats support “tax breaks that would benefit the wealthy” (not joking)
- They claim that Democrats are “collecting their $174,000 salary while refusing to come to DC to vote.” (Because of the pandemic, but they’re still working, voting, and holding hearings.)
- They claim Democrats support “the blanket release of prisoners, including murderers and rapists.”
- They claim Democrats support “Paycheck Protection Program funds to be used to pay corporate lobbyists and dark money groups.” (Republicans voted for the same legislation, and the Trump administration refuses to disclose recipients.)
- And Democrats are “changing election and voting laws to help them stay in power.”
They haven’t released the full poll, so we don’t even know what else they may have asked. And here’s the thing …
Despite being told that Democrats want to increase taxes 20%, give tax breaks to the wealthy, get paid for doing nothing, blanket release murderers and rapists from prisons, give free money to lobbyists, and cheat in elections … despite all that, they still only manage a one-point lead among these voters!
Think about it: They used the most absolutely, ridiculously bullshit-filled attacks imaginable, and they still couldn’t get a clear majority of a narrow slice of an electorate they themselves selected to give themselves their best numbers.
What’s more, they had to admit this: “While 51% of swing voters in battleground districts support the protests (but not the violent aspects), when asked ‘based on the things that you have seen, read, or heard, do you support or oppose defunding police departments?’ a full 46% strongly opposed defunding police departments.”
So … a majority of their respondents, primed with all sorts of ridiculous anti-Democratic statements, still supported Black Lives Matter protests, and less than half strongly opposed defunding police departments, and they then have the hilarious gall to claim: “The bottom line is that Congressional Democrats are still decidedly out of line with political reality and it will cost them seats in November”?
Releasing this poll was an act of desperation. What it tells us is this:
- Republicans won’t release polling including all voters in battleground districts.
- Instead, they selected an undefined slice of voters, claimed they were “swing voters” from “battleground districts.”
- They then threw the most ridiculous anti-Democratic claims against them.
- And, despite those efforts, could only eke out a one-point lead.
So the real bottom line?
Congressional Republicans told a group of voters that Democrats want to release all murderers and rapists, and the still only got a one-point lead.
When put that way, that’s not so impressive after all, huh?
If you want to know where things really stand, it’s a seven-point lead in the generic congressional ballot in our Civiqs daily tracking poll.
Look how rock solid that trend line is. And even that is a slight improvement from 2018, when we had it +6 Democratic. (Democrats won the generic ballot in 2018 by 8.6 points, so turns out we were slightly pessimistic.)
That is remarkable stability over the last two years. The demographics that shifted for that landslide Democratic election have stayed put. Nothing is moving anymore. We have a new normal. And it doesn’t include Republicans getting any fantasy +1 advantage over anything that actually matters.