Tuesday, October 25, 2022

A SPORTS GUY MAKES ME WONDER IF THE "DEMOCRATS ARE DOOMED" CONSENSUS NARRATIVE IS WRONG

The New York Times has returned to its happy place: Democrats are doomed.
Republicans are pressing their advantage deep into Democratic territory in the closing stretch of the 2022 campaign, competing for an abundance of House seats amid growing signs that voters are poised to punish President Biden’s party even in the bluest parts of America....

“We thought for a little bit that we could defy gravity, but the reality is setting in,” said Sean McElwee, executive director of Data for Progress, a progressive research and polling firm.
We're told that Republicans are on the verge of beating Democrats in Oregon, California, New York ... and that might be true. It's certainly what every major-media observer -- left, center, and right -- believes now.

So I'm grateful to Adam McGinnis for directing my attention to this. It's not from a political pundit. It's from Evan Scrimshaw, who mostly writes about sports betting. He notes that the polling in the New York governor's race is tightening -- incumbent Democrat Kathy Hochul's lead is at 7.4 points, down from 18.4 in late August, and the online betting site PredictIt doesn't price the race as a guaranteed Democratic win. Scrimshaw thinks that's absurd:
The case for this being somewhere on the board is that a lot of polls have Hochul’s lead in the single digits, and that those pollsters overestimated Joe Biden’s leads in 2020 over Donald Trump.

... The problem with that is, we know those polls are wrong – because there’s also a Senate race in New York this year, and we know those polls are wrong.

In the three elections Chuck Schumer has run as an incumbent, his average margin of victory is 41%. Schumer is an electoral force, winning by at least 30% three straight cycles, including in 2010, a notoriously bad year for Democrats.

And his lead, on average, is only 17%.

... What’s happening is that Siena and Marist and Quinnipiac are correcting for 2020 in their polling. It’s a logical response to being wrong, and one we know generally leads to overcorrection.

... The idea that New York is going to go red during an at-best moderately GOP year – and a year where Democrats are winning Michigan and Minnesota Governors – is for the birds.
Is Scrimshaw right? I don't know. But why assume that the polls can only be underestimating the GOP's strength, as everyone in the political press is doing? Why couldn't it be the other way?

(Remember, in most of these tight races that once seemed to be sure Democratic wins, the Democrats are still leading in the polls. Many people are just assuming that it's necessary to correct for a pro-Democratic polling bias, even though that bias might not actually exist, so they're counting any race in which Democrats have a slight lead as a probably Republican win.)

Scrimshaw also thinks the polls are underestimating the strength of Senator Catherine Cortez Masto, because polls generally underestimate Democratic strength in Nevada. And, well...


But even Sean McElwee at Data for Progress thinks Democrats are doomed! But Data for Progress polls sometimes skew right.

We've all forgotten last year's California gubernatorial recall election. The final Real Clear Politics polling average said Gavin Newsom would survive the recall by a margin of 14.5 points. The actual margin was 23.8. We can laugh at the final survey from the right-wing pollster Trafalgar, which predicted a Newsom victory margin of just 8.6 points (which is why the great results for Republicans in nearly every Trafalgar poll don't scare me) -- but the margin in the last Data for Progress poll was only 14 points. In fact, only a couple of pollsters predicted a Newsom win even close to the final margin, and no poll overestimated Newsom's victory.

So, yes, polls can be skewed against Democrats. Now, maybe the Democrats really are doomed. But they might not be.

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