THE PREDICTABLE REPUBLICAN FREAKOUT IF DEMOCRATS EXCEED EXPECTATIONS IN NOVEMBER

Tom Bonier is the CEO of TargetSmart, a Democratic data firm. He's been telling people that voter registration since the Supreme Court's Dobbs decision has heavily favored Democrats. Last week he wrote this in a New York Times op-ed:

In my 28 years of analyzing elections, I had never seen anything like what’s happened in the past two months in American politics: Women are registering to vote in numbers I never witnessed before. I’ve run out of superlatives to describe how different this moment is, especially in light of the cycles of tragedy and eventual resignation of recent years. This is a moment to throw old political assumptions out the window and to consider that Democrats could buck historic trends this cycle....

Election prognostication relies heavily on precedent. Yet there is no precedent for an election centered on the removal of a constitutional right affirmed a half-century before. Every poll we consume over the closing weeks of this election will rely on a likely voter model for which we have no benchmark.

Then on Thursday there was this in the Houston Chronicle:

A new analysis from political data and polling firm TargetSmart found that while Texas’ new voter registrants are evenly split between men and women, they are younger and more Democratic than before the June ruling.

“It’s not that we’re not seeing a surge from women but that in Texas, we’re somewhat uniquely also seeing a surge from men, particularly younger, more progressive men, who are matching the surge from women,” said the firm’s CEO Tom Bonier....

According to TargetSmart, Democrats now have a 10-percentage point advantage among new registrants since Dobbs, making up 42 percent to Republicans’ 32 percent. Prior to Dobbs, Republicans had a five-point advantage.

The state’s young voters — defined as those under age 25 — are also leaning more blue, the analysis found. Democrats now make up 47 percent of young Texas voters, up from 34 percent. The Republican share has remained the same at just under 30 percent.

That’s in line with what TargetSmart is seeing in 25 states that report party registration.

I don't know if what Bonier is saying is accurate, and if so, I don't know if it's enough to overcome the usual GOP voter enthusiasm and other advantages that regularly lead to Republican victories in states like Florida, Texas, Georgia, and Arizona.

But what if Bonier is right? What if the polls we're seeing are based on likely-voter models that don't take this surge of pro-Democratic enthusiasm and anger into account? What if Democrats beat expectations in November and win not only the races where they're seen as competitive, but a few where they aren't?

That would be awesome. It would also make Republicans' heads explode.

In 2016 and 2020, the polls underestimated Republican turnout. Regardless of what the GOP will tell you, Democrats never questioned that those votes were real. In 2016 we complained about leaks, disinformation, and psychologically manipulative ads microtargeted to voters based on corruptly obtained Facebook user data. We blamed the Russians. We blamed James Comey for his last-minute announcement that the Hillary Clinton investigation was being reopened. But we never doubted that the votes were real. We acknowledged that Trump won the Electoral College in 2016, and nearly won it in 2020, because, to a greater extent than we'd anticipated, eligible voters had cast lawful ballots for Donald Trump (and, in 2020, for candidates we'd expected to lose, such as Susan Collins).

Republicans won't react that way this year if polls are underestimating Democratic strength. They'll cry fraud. And where they control the electoral process, they'll say that the difference between the polls and the election results is all the evidence they need to show that fraud happened.

After the votes were counted in 2016, Democrats beat themselves up: How did we underestimate this right-wing anger? Were we unable to perceive it because we live in an elite bubble? The media sources we relied on churned out endless pieces, most of them written in diners, that tried to identify the voters we'd overlooked and explain how they thought.

Nothing like that will happen if Democrats overperform in November. I worry that the same mainstream media will take Republicans' claims of fraud seriously, because the Republicans making the allegations will be seasoned pros like Ron DeSantis and Brian Kemp, not amateurs and clowns like Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell.

In my last post, I predicted widespread cheating by Republicans in the midterms. I think it's likely that many Republicans will try to cheat, but honest election officials -- the ones who haven't been driven to retire -- could still prevent serious fraud from taking place. But then these same honest officials might be accused of dishonesty for counting real Democratic votes. It might get ugly.