On Thursday night, The New York Times relayed breaking news about a new round of Times/Siena battleground polls with the headline, “Polls in four swing districts show GOP’s strength in midterms.” Yikes. The first two paragraphs likewise offered a grim assessment.
President Biden is unpopular everywhere. Economic concerns are mounting. Abortion rights are popular but social issues are more often secondary.
A new series of House polls by The New York Times and Siena College across four archetypal swing districts offers fresh evidence that Republicans are poised to retake Congress this fall as the party dominated among voters who care most about the economy.
Ugh.
Except, Democrats were winning three of the districts and the fourth was a tie.
- KS-3: D+14, 55%-41% (Rep. Davids (D) v. Adkins (R))
- NV-1: Tie, 47%-47% (Rep. Titus (D) v. Robertson (R))
- NM-2: D+1, 48%-47% (Vasquez (D) v. Rep. Herrell (R))
- PA-8: D+6, 50%-44% (Rep. Cartwright (D) v. Bognet (R))
In a thread containing the new results, Nate Cohn, who co-authored the Times piece with Shane Goldmacher, tweeted: “Obviously, four districts can't say a ton about the battle for the House. But on balance, the polls are better for Democrats than I would have guessed given our national polling...”
In other words, Democrats beat Cohn’s expectations in all four districts given his own priors. Now, how that squares with the framing of those first two paragraphs is a complete mystery.
I'm not an eager media scold—particularly when it comes to political reporting—after serving as part of the D.C. press corps myself. But Beltway coverage of the horse race this cycle has been something to behold. The subversive strain of GOP cheerleading emanating from a relatively exclusive group of supposedly sober reporters and analysts has reached fever pitch, and perhaps it would be more tolerable if the polling appeared to warrant it, but it does not.
Instead, the surge of red-wave stories seems jarringly disproportional to the publicly available information we have about the election as it stands. After generic ballot polls looked slightly better for Republicans last week, they are back this week to suggesting a more resilient tale for Democrats this cycle.
Reviewing all 12 polls conducted since last Thursday, Oct. 20, and aggregated by FiveThirtyEight.com, only two of them show a Republican advantage, one of which is a quasi-right leaning pollster—InsiderAdvantage.
The USA Today/Suffolk University poll is 100% legit, giving Republicans a 5-point advantage over Democrats. Could it prove to be accurate on Election Day? Sure. But in the scheme of things right now, it's an outlier, particularly among the latest round of non-partisan polls. There's a reason data analysts aggregate polls in order to correct for surveys that seem to vary significantly from other data sets.
Additionally, Civiqs tracking of the generic ballot has shown a remarkably consistent trend line for the past couple months, with Democrats edging out Republicans by anywhere from 2 - 4 points.
Due to structural inequities in our electoral system, however, conventional wisdom holds that Democrats must be up roughly a handful of points in the generic ballot in order to have a shot at keeping the House. Based on polling alone, the FiveThirtyEight "classic" model now gives Republicans about an 80% chance of taking the House. Pretty good. But there's a big difference between a GOP tsunami that gives House Republicans a 30-seat advantage and a takeover in which they control the lower chamber by single digits. The only thing worse for GOP Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy than losing the House could be winning it by 5 seats. The resulting caucus of deranged MAGA misfits will be an ungovernable majority that kicks things off with a knife fight over the speakership.
Democrats have a much better shot at keeping the Senate, with the "classic" model giving them a 60% chance of holding the majority. A red-wave night would almost surely result in a GOP takeover of the upper chamber, but that's not what the FiveThirtyEight model is predicting given the fundamentals of the cycle (including polling, fundraising, past voting trends, etc.).
In fact, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer was caught in a hot mic moment Thursday giving President Joe Biden a rundown of where things stand in the Senate contests. Some of the conversation is inaudible, but what can be heard doesn't exactly sound like a panicked five-alarm fire discussion.
"It looks like the debate didn't hurt us too much in Pennsylvania as of today, so that's good," Schumer explains. "We're picking up steam in Nevada. ... The state where we're going downhill is Georgia. It's hard to believe that they will go for Herschel Walker."
But Schumer also gushes over Democrats' early voting advantage in Georgia so far.
"But our early turnout in Georgia is huge. HUGE," Schumer says.
Far from a GOP rout, the Senate sounds competitive, with Democrats feeling better in some races and expressing some concern about others.
Whatever the outcome is, Democrats don't appear to be "scrambling" into "a defensive crouch," as the Washington Post wrote this week; nor do they seem to fear "a new shellacking," as the New York Times framed the final weeks of the campaign.
Never-Trumper and founder of The Bulwark Sarah Longwell suggested in a tweet that election reporters had been duped by a new, seemingly bullish $11 million ad buy in 16 districts by the House GOP-aligned super PAC, Congressional Leadership Fund.
"I don't think R's are going to win many of these reach-seats they're pushing into. But it's not a waste of money," Longwell tweeted. "They've purchased themselves a very strong offense narrative in the media. It projects a confidence on momentum that can be self-fulfilling."
It should go without saying that it’s a reporter’s job to do their due diligence and make certain they're not merely serving as a mouthpiece for partisan claims that don't actually bear out given the facts on the ground.
But that appears to be exactly what’s happening over and over, with many reporters and data analysts adding a distinctly partisan slant to their horse-race coverage.
In New York's gubernatorial race between Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul and her GOP rival Lee Zeldin, the Times declared the race “up for grabs” in a contest where Hochul holds a 7-point lead in the FiveThirtyEight aggregate. It’s the not the lead Democrats would like to see in a progressive stronghold like the Empire State this close to Election Day, but still TargetSmart CEO and data analyst Tom Bonier marveled over the assertion.
"Hochul holds a 7.3 pt lead in the poll avg. Siena has her up 11," Bonier tweeted. "If that qualifies as 'up for grabs' and a 'red tide', then I look forward to the NYT reporting on the 'blue wave' in OK, IA, FL, GA, OH, and NC, where GOPs are all facing narrower polling leads than Hochul."
Pro tip: Don't go looking for those stories.
I am not a conspiracy theorist, but something strange, perhaps even pernicious, appears to be going on here. On one hand, the Beltway groupthink—which seems wed to the notion that Democrats are doomed—could simply be cheerleading for the outcome most of them have been predicting since the beginning of the year.
That’s what I had started to believe and what University of Florida professor and elections expert Michael McDonald suggested in a tweet Wednesday night. After The Economist data journalist G. Elliot Morris tweeted a meme stating the election “always has been” a referendum on the incumbent party, McDonald subtweeted, “If you want to know why election forecasters are cheering for a Republican victory, it is because their fundamentals forecasting models say it will happen.”
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“Ignore the noise,” McDonald added down thread. “Go vote if you haven't already done so. This will be a high turnout and close election.”
But it’s also possible that Republicans, by projecting ultimate confidence and reinforcing it with a last-minute ad buy, have enlisted a bunch of election reporters and forecasters to push the red-wave PR campaign they have been predisposed to since the outset of the cycle.
That overly optimistic assessment of GOP chances could be part of a feedback loop that helps create a self-fulfilling prophecy, as Longwell suggested. But what if Republicans’ goal is an even more nefarious effort to prime GOP base voters into believing they've been cheated if Republicans don’t win big. What if, after all the red-wave hype, Democrats have a decent night and hold the Senate or, god forbid, have a really good night and maintain control of both chambers?
If that were to happen, the same Republican lawmakers and candidates who have spent two years spewing Donald Trump’s baseless stolen election garbage will be perfectly situated to weaponize the anger and dismay of their supporters once again. We’ve already seen this GOP play following 2020. It resulted in a violent coup attempt that took lives, injured more than 140 police officers, exacted longterm mental anguish, and continues to rip at the fabric of our country today. In fact, we haven’t even reached Election Day and already masked and armed vigilantes are harassing and intimidating voters who are merely trying to exercise their constitutional rights.
The potential for violence is real. Republicans have spent two years engendering distrust in the election system and grooming their base to believe they were cheated out of what was rightfully theirs last election. And now, whether Beltway reporters and prognosticators realize it or not, they are actively pouring gasoline on a carefully cultivated GOP tinder box. Worse yet, many of them are simply doing it for sport and bragging rights in a midterm contest that will undoubtedly play an important role in charting the future course of our exceedingly fragile democracy.
On The Brief podcast, we speak with Way To Win’s co-founder and vice president, Jenifer Fernandez Ancona. Ancona comes in to discuss how grassroots progressive groups are spending money in the hopes of getting as many voters as possible out for the midterm elections. She also talks about which campaign advertisements are effective and which are not. One thing is for sure, though: We are living in historic times, and what that means for these midterms cannot be easily predicted—so Get Out The Vote!
Donald Trump and his MAGA allies came close to overthrowing our democracy on January 6, and they will try again if they win in 2022. The best thing you can do is to help get out the Democratic vote for the midterms, and we need everyone to do what they can. Click here to find all the volunteer opportunities available.
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