FiveThirtyEight’s Nathaniel Rakich reports: The Polls Are Getting Better For Republicans. The heading of the piece notes, “It is a midterm year after all.”
As we know, the historical pattern in the US is for the president’s party to do poorly in mid-term elections, especially in their first term. This is attributable to any number of key factors, not the least of which being that voters tend to be fairly simplistic in their assessment of the government and treat elections of this nature as about the president on the mistaken proviso that whatever is happening in the country is the president’s fault, at least to some degree. This is especially true if the country is experiencing any kind of obvious problem like, well, generational levels of inflation as the global economy recovers from the effects of a worldwide pandemic.
You know, that sort of thing.
Further, it is generally the case that the opposition party is more energized than the president’s party because they just lost a mere two years ago and want the chance to register their views on the sitting president.
Additionally, many voters who voted for the sitting president will be disappointed because it is literally impossible for any given president to have accomplished everything all the voters expected that president to accomplish. Put another way: any given president starts disappointing someone (indeed, a large number of someones) the minute they are inaugurated (indeed, even before that).
The current movement in the polling tracks with these expectations:
This change has affected FiveThirtyEight’s midterm forecasts too. Democrats’ chances of holding onto Senate control have fallen from 66-in-100 on Oct. 13 to 55-in-100 today. And Republicans have gone from having a 69-in-100 chance of flipping the House on Oct. 13 to an 80-in-100 chance today.
To be clear: a 55% chance is a very real chance that the Democrats will hold onto the Senate. For that matter, things with a 20% chance of happening happen all the time (20% of the time, in fact!) so a Dem hold is not impossible (but I certainly wouldn’t bet the house on it, nor, I guess, the House).
Regardless, the polling shifts away from the president’s party are also part of a standing pattern:
Granted, 2022 has been an exceptionally good mid-term for the president’s party on the generic ballot polling, perhaps owing to our increased polarization and to the nature of the party conflict at the moment (i.e., Trumpism and all that that encompasses).
Rakich attributes a good bit of that to Dobbs, which is a reasonable assumption:
But that doesn’t mean the Dobbs decision didn’t make a difference. Take another look at that graph. The 2022 line (along with the 2014 line) is at the very top of the chart. In other words, Democrats may lose ground from here on out, but they are starting from a higher baseline than usual. And without the boost Democrats received over the summer, we may have been forecasting a so-called “red wave” — a Republican landslide of 6-10 points. While the possibility of another polling error in Republicans’ favor means that outcome is still on the table, it’s more likely that 2022 will be a more modest Republican victory. For Democrats, it could have been a lot worse.
I would add, too, that if the GOP had nominated less controversial (dare I say, normal) candidates in GA, NH, OH, and PA, I don’t expect we would be having any kind of real conversation about the Democrats maintaining control of the Senate.
Certainty turnout will matter, as I think there are reasons to assume that turnout will be higher this cycle than normal. As such, the polling models could be off. Still, as we have known from the beginning of Biden’s term, we seem to be clearly heading where we thought we were heading: a loss of seats for Democrats.
