Why the Polls May be Underestimating Democrats

The case for a 2022 redux.

(Credit for the voiceover for this article goes to the great Samuel Lipson)

It was just two weeks before the election, and the Republican Party was surging.

For anyone who followed politics, it was impossible to escape the news. If you checked Politico, you’d be presented with articles telling you how to “[Make] sense of the GOP’s October surge.” Go over to the New Yorker and you’d see an extensive feature explaining “Why Republican Insiders Think the G.O.P. is Poised for a Blowout.” For the other side of the aisle, the New York Times would tell you that the Democrats were “Fearing a New Shellacking.” Scroll down a bit further to the Times opinion section, and you’d see an article purporting to explain “Why Republicans Are Surging.” Switch over to leading probabilistic forecasts, and you'd see exactly this happening: a once-solid Democratic position eroding rapidly, with Republicans clearly holding the momentum and on track to be favorites on Election Day.

In case you can’t tell what I’m getting at here, it’s this: every single one of these articles were released in advance of the 2022 midterms. In fact, almost all of them were released within the same few days in late October. This is the forgotten part of that race—the big part about it that was buried under all of the media’s self-congratulatory postmortems. Right at the closing stages of the election, after months of correctly covering the race as a more-or-less neutral year, nearly every single elite political commentator in the country flinched. On the forecasts and aggregates, they opened the floodgates to every poll that showed Republicans ahead. When polls found Democrats ahead, the pollsters who conducted them would use their platforms to talk their own data down. Opinion writers like David Brooks, linked above, pre-wrote entire narratives about how Democrats lost by being out-of-touch elites who went too far to the left. Even the most prestigious analysts in the country would change entire state ratings with the sole purpose of finding some way to show the GOP ahead.

In short, they used everything in their power to make Republicans appear in as strong a position as possible. They ended up being completely wrong, and they also ended up facing no consequences for it. Now, with the lights as bright they can be, they may be doing the exact same thing again to an even more extreme extent. Here’s how the stars might be aligning for a polling error that favors Trump in 2024, or: how pundits and pollsters might be courting complete disaster so they can cover their own asses.