Posted on 10/18/2022 8:35:46 PM PDT by Steely Tom
Republicans always believe the polls are slanted against them. That belief has sometimes caused them to misread big political races.
In 2012, for example, a significant number of Republicans convinced themselves that GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney was actually going to defeat incumbent Democratic President Barack Obama. There was a lot of talk about "unskewing" the polls. Then Obama beat Romney handily.
But there have also been some egregious examples of polling bias, or at least polling mistakes, in the years since Donald Trump entered national politics. On many occasions, pollsters have seemed unable to measure Trump's appeal, especially in state-level polls.
In the 2016 Trump vs. Hillary Clinton race, the polls showed Clinton winning in three states critical to Trump's victory -- Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. In Wisconsin, the RealClearPolitics average of polls on Election Day showed Clinton winning by 6.5 points; in fact, Trump won by seven-tenths of a point.
In Michigan, the polls had Clinton up by 3.6 points; Trump won by three-tenths of a point. And in Pennsylvania, the polls showed Clinton ahead by 2.1 points; Trump won by seven-tenths of a point.
In the 2020 Trump-Joe Biden race, even when the polls got the winner right, they were sometimes off by a lot. In Wisconsin, for example, the final RealClearPolitics average of polls showed Biden winning by 6.7 points; in fact, Biden won by seven-tenths of a point. And no Republican will forget the Washington Post poll, published in late October, that showed Biden 17 points ahead of Trump.
It was crazy -- an embarrassment pollsters should not soon forget.
So what does all that mean for today? The midterm elections are one month away, and polls are everywhere. The question is: Do the polls have the same old problems?
We don't know. But there are reasons to suspect problems persist. And now RealClearPolitics has begun an exercise in comparing today's midterm polls to the known errors of polls from 2016, 2018 and 2020. If it turns out the mistakes are happening again, the election results could be quite different from what pundits are counting on today.
RCP took each contested midterm state and looked at the polling average today. Then they averaged the known polling error from 2016, 2018 and 2020 -- two presidential elections and one midterm, all with Trump involved. Then they took that figure -- the polling error -- and applied it to today's poll, just to see what things look like.
Start with the Pennsylvania Senate race. Today's average of polls shows Democratic candidate John Fetterman ahead of Republican Mehmet Oz by 3.7 points. Then look at past Pennsylvania polls.
At this point in each campaign, 28 days before Election Day, the 2016 polls showed Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump by 8.6 points; the 2018 midterm polls showed Democratic Sen. Bob Casey up by 16.0 points; and the 2020 polls showed Biden over Trump by 6.5 points. When compared with the final election results in those years, the polls at this point in the race underestimated Republican performance by 5.9 percentage points.
So is Oz really 3.7 points behind Fetterman? Maybe. But if the polls today are misreading the electorate in a way similar to past elections, Oz could actually be ahead by 2.2 points. Again, that is at this particular moment in the race, not on Election Day. But the polls might have the horse race wrong.
Other races might be closer than they seem. In New Hampshire, Democratic Sen. Maggie Hassan leads Republican challenger Don Bolduc by 5.3 points in the RCP average. But factor in the polls' errors from past years, and Hassan's lead is nine-tenths of a point -- a far more competitive race. In North Carolina, the RCP average shows Republican Ted Budd leading Democrat Cheri Beasley by 1.5 points. Factor in the old mistakes, and Budd's lead is 6.0 points.
Those are big differences. But there is one closely watched race where the polls, at least by this measure, appear to be right on the money. In Georgia, Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock leads Republican Herschel Walker by 3.8 points.
A look at the historical polls from 2016, 2018 and 2020 shows no difference from the final result those years. Therefore, by this measure at least, Warnock's 3.8-point lead over Walker is real. Remember, that is just a description of this point in the race, 28 days before Election Day, but Warnock's lead is solid.
And in one race, the earlier polls actually underestimated Democratic performance. In Nevada today, Republican Adam Laxalt is leading Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto by 2.1 points. But past polls suggest that might be an overstatement, and Laxalt's lead is actually 1.1 points. He is still ahead, but it's a very close race.
What does all this tell us? In most of the races, even with historical error factored in, the Senate seat in question will not change parties. RealClearPolitics predicts Republicans will not lose any of the seats they already hold and will pick up seats in Arizona and Nevada, and thus win control of the Senate.
Maybe so. A more cautious prediction would be one GOP pickup, the one in Nevada. And an even more cautious prediction would be no pickups at all, and a continued 50-50 tie, with functional Democratic control, in the Senate.
But we do know state polls have been seriously wrong in the past. Serious people are trying to understand how that happened and what it might mean for today's midterm contests. And right now, it appears the picture could be somewhat better for Republicans than the polls say.
Byron York was always worth reading, even back in the National Review days.
Rational, decent people do not take unsolicited calls from strangers and then go on to discuss their political beliefs and preferences. They know that they will immediately be entered into government and corporate data bases that will affect their employment, finances and may lead to harassment of many different types. Sensible people simply do not answer polls but they do vote. Therefore Republicans are undercounted in polls especially in these times.
I would have answered a political poll in the past but never again. We all know now we’ll end up like Steve Bannon or the Jan 6th defendants: put on a list and targeted. And I’m not even a conspiracy theorist!
All of MAGA lies low now.
It had nothing to do with the fact that Romney kept agreeing with Obama in the debates. He inspired no excitement among Republicans. Romney was supposed to be an antidote to Obama fatigue except there wasn’t enough of that to influence the election. I voted for Romney because there was no other choice. Same with Dole, both Bushes and McCain. None of them were anything more than a placeholder. Bush 2 was lucky they didn’t turn Florida in the courts.
And really if a poll doesn’t predict an outcome it’s because they failed to convince voters that they were right. Polls are tools to shape opinion not to predict.
The polls had Hillary winning 90% of the vote......but the Dems didn’t have enough votes stashed away to pull it off.....smirk.
LOL! The usual BS. Richard Baris and Robert Barnes have gone over the pattern of Leftist Democrat bias in almost all of these polls with only a handful of exceptions such as Trafalgar and Rasmussen.
The pattern works like this. Late summer they always push the narrative that the Democrats have a huge lead or in the case of this year that they don’t trail badly. The hope is to both discourage Republican voters as well as to hype up the Democrats’ chances in order to help them raise campaign cash.
Then as it gets closer to the election and they need to cover their butts, they all pretend there’s this big late swing to the Republicans by the electorate. No there isn’t. The swing to the Democrats was always fake.....a product of response bias and biased pollsters deliberately skewing their polls.
Oh, and Walker is going to win in Georgia. So will Blake Masters in Arizona. The Republicans are likely to win the governorship in Wisconsin and at least one of Michigan or Pennsylvania (most likely Michigan where Gestapo Gretchen looks likely to lose). Oz is going to defeat Uncle Festerman in Pennsylvania too. JD Vance is going to romp to victory in Ohio. The Republicans are going to have 52-53 Senators and about 245-250 Representatives.
Bingo. Rich Baris discusses this regularly - Response Bias.
Most right leaning voters know that most pollsters are partisan Democrats and they simply do not trust them. Ergo they either refuse to participate in polling or they even deliberately lie to the pollsters as an “eff you”.
The people who LOVE to answer and who can’t seem to talk about their politics enough to one and all are much more likely to be Democrats.
The pollsters all know this of course. Those who are honest use different polling methods (people respond to different methods such as online, phone calls, text messages, etc at different rates), AND they make sure they are getting representative samples from each segment of the population and weight the responses accordingly. eg college degree, post grad, some college, high school, etc
Those who are dishonest just report the raw numbers and pretend its accurate even though they know its not representative. That’s most pollsters.
I think pollsters can adjust for difficulty in reaching one part of the population or the other.
The real secret sauce is their likely-voter model and predicting turnout.
The reason Trafalgar, Rasmussen, etc. show better results for Republicans is they make different assumptions about who’s going to vote.
That’s another reason the polls tend to tighten at the end - everyone switches from registered- to likely-voter models.
Rasmussen is about the only pollster I know using likely-voter models more than a couple of months before the election.
Few people with any sense thought that Romney or McCain had a chance of beating Obama. Both were/are insufferable, self-aggrandizing hacks and jerks.
Baris has been wrong on many occasions. They can’t be always right.
I hope he’s right about November 2022 but I’m not holding my breath.
Was the country such a wreck in those years? The candidates illicited strong passions but you were working and the economy was not a wreck and the country was not being sold out by a senile president
No Romney lover here and I think I have some sense, but I had Romney winning, he was winning the polls by the same margin as Trump was. I had never seen enthusiasm for a candidate like I did for Romney, at least in PA. Even Obama acted like he was a 1 termer. There was zero enthusiasm for Obama as well. I will go to my grave believing they overshot on the fraud, even picking up 2 senate seats when R were guaranteed for a 2-4 seat senate pickup. Vote fraud is the big talk on here for the last 2 years but has been standard OP for democrats for decades. 2020 they just focused on the prez. 2018 was the congress, but it is hard work and difficult to do because in politics you lose so many people after every election. Its like trying to put together a superbowl team from scratch every 2 years for just 1 game.
They’re all wrong sometimes. Baris has been THE most accurate pollster over the last decade.
Read later.
Romney Did Win The Election. It Was Stolen By The Dems.
Good points. And yes, it is difficult not to think that the 2012 election was riddled with fraud, just as the more recent ones have been.
No one believe Romney was going to win.
When I saw him in CO and his lame performance, I knew he was going to do a McCain lay down and walk home with the cash.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.