electoralism

…What it Might be Telling us…

To start, there is some grain of truth to the popular conception that non partisan pollsters “won” 2022—I’ve supported that conception before. It is undeniably the case that there were some nonpartisan outlets that were both willing to buck the consensus and saw remarkably accurate results that year. The New York Times and Marist College, for instance, both went against the grain at the end of the cycle and published results that had Senate Democrats ahead by almost the exact margins that they ended up winning by. District-level congressional polling from the Times also proved to be eerily accurate. In my eyes, these two firms gained a ton of credibility here—not just because of how right they were, but because they were demonstrably willing to go against the consensus at risk of being deeply wrong in the same exact way once again. We can, in a sense, trust them to be brave.

However, it’s important to understand that the Times and Marist were both outliers in this regard. For every pollster like them, there were many nonpartisan firms that either didn’t participate in 2022 at all or only published a few surveys. Additionally, there are also quite a lot of nonpartisan pollsters who did participate in 2022, but ended up putting out results that were suspiciously in line with the red wave consensus, even if they weren’t quite as off as the partisan Republican firms. The Washington senate race from that year is a clear example of this. As shown in the linked Times article from 2022, nonpartisan pollsters spent most of the year showing the incumbent Democratic Senator, Patty Murray, up by about as much as she won by. But once Election Day got closer, GOP-aligned firms began polling the race and showing close margins, spurring narratives about the race as a “sleeper flip.” Following this, nonpartisan pollsters who surveyed the race suddenly started to find a far tighter contest. By the end, they, too, would show substantial movement away from the Senator, only finding her up by just over eight points. While it was far more accurate than the nearly-tied race presented by GOP firms, it was still a collective miss of six points. In reality, Murray won by nearly 15.

This phenomenon—wherein nonpartisan pollsters abruptly shifted at the end of the race to match “movement” that only existed in the world of media narratives and GOP-aligned polls —wasn’t just limited to Washington. In New Hampshire, the polls had the incumbent Democratic Senator, Maggie Hassan, up by roughly eight points at the start of October. By Election Day, they only had her up by two. The story was the same as in Washington: GOP-aligned firms started showing a close race near the end, and nonpartisan firms started playing copycat, presenting a race more Democratic than the results from partisan firms but more Republican than the actual results. It also happened in Michigan, just as it did in Arizona. Even in Pennsylvania, which has since been remembered as 2022’s definitive case of GOP zone flooding, much of Oz’s supposed late surge came as a result of pollsters with no connection to the GOP at all suddenly showing leads for him at the end of the race. Noticeably, this occurred just as political talk became dominated by talk of a Fetterman collapse after his debate against Oz. 

The most charitable explanation for non-partisan pollsters here is this: that these final shifts represented real movement, but that these states were just tough places to poll, and that they had just been underestimating Democrats throughout. In Washington, for instance, this says that Murray would have “actually” been up by 20 points when nonpartisan pollsters found her up by 13, and that she fell to the margin she actually won by at the close of the election, when they observed her falling from +13 to +8. Quite convenient, but seemingly possible…until you look at the results for this year's Washington senate primary. In that blanket election, the combined vote of the Democratic Senate candidates beat out the combined vote of the Republican Senate candidates by just under 15 points, a margin practically identical to Murray’s ultimate margin of victory. 

This, coupled with the fact that this phenomenon occurred in so many states always right after the beginning of pro-Republican media narratives, should raise some major suspicions at the bare minimum. At the very least, it shows that most nonpartisan pollsters haven’t earned the right to be trusted to be brave like the New York Times and Marists of the world. If they’ve shown us anything, it’s that they’re extremely susceptible to any signs—valid or not—that the GOP could be poised for an upset, and that they see pushing their numbers to the right to be erring on the side of caution. And if they’ve learned anything from 2022, it’s that there are no consequences for doing this. If the GOP ends up outperforming like the partisan polls and the media says they will, they end up being right. But if they don’t, even the biggest Democratic hacks in the world will lay all their blame on partisan “red wave pollsters,” while nonpartisan pollsters writ large will see a reputational boost courtesy of the few firms who were both a) willing to be bold and b) happened to be correct.

This is quite concerning for our specific moment: the end of a presidential election, when the risk of reputational damage is as high as can be and pro-GOP media narratives are in full swing. And it’s extremely concerning when absolutely nothing we’ve seen from the world of pollsters and elite pundits indicates that they’re willing to take any risks whatsoever this year.

…And What we Know is Happening now

For this section, two sources are indispensable: Nate Cohn’s two recent pieces about how pollsters have changed how they operate in 2024. They provide a lot of direct evidence for what was once mostly speculation, and they could very well prove to be a canary in the coal mine if the pollsters end up overestimating Trump this year. But they were not the inspiration for this piece. In fact, what inspired me to publish this article didn’t have anything to do with polls at all. It was when the Cook Political Report changed its rating of Pennsylvania’s Senate race from Leans Democratic to Toss Up, right after they did the same for the Senate race in Wisconsin.

To call these moves cowardly would be a disservice to cowards. They’re also nothing new for the post-2020 punditry world. Of the myriad of examples of their attempts at hedging and ass-covering, the most egregious by far is the one I mentioned at the beginning of this article: when Sabato’s Crystal Ball shifted two entire states towards Republicans so they could project the party as on track to being favored in the Senate while still deferring to John Ralston’s projection that Democrats would hold on in Nevada. It was a complete absurdity—a textbook example of coming to a conclusion first and then working backwards to justify it. And ever since the 2020 election, every forecaster and pundit has done essentially this, working overtime to provide ratings that are the best they can give for the GOP at any given moment.

Understanding this mindset is the only way to understand Cook’s latest moves. Rating those two states as tossups at the presidential level is one thing, but to do it at the Senate level is another thing entirely. These aren’t hypercompetitive races. They’re contests where the Democratic incumbents have held continuous leads ever since they’ve been polled. In Wisconsin, every single poll besides two conducted by GOP-leaning firms has shown a lead for Tammy Baldwin. Things are almost the exact same in Pennsylvania, where only two nonpartisan polls in the entire history of the race have shown anything other than a lead for Bob Casey. Averages currently show Casey up 4.5 points in his race and Baldwin up 3.7 points in hers, both practically identical to the leads currently held by Republican Senators Rick Scott in Florida and Ted Cruz in Texas, respectively.

This might lead one to believe that Cook also has the Texas and Florida races rated as tossups, but they don’t. Cruz’s race is currently ranked as Leans Republican on Cook, while Scott’s is ranked as Likely Republican. It’s a flagrant example of hedging. Unless Cook is willing to be consistent here, in which case their commentary would be so vague as to be useless, there is simply no empirical justification for these ratings other than a belief that the polls are very likely to be very wrong in a way that benefits Republicans. And in this case, you would need to put Trump down as a meaningful favorite to win Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, which Cook doesn’t do. They just want to have their cake and eat it, too, by rating Democrats as low as possible while still providing enough wriggle room to say that they technically never forecasted a Trump win if he loses.