Will the Polls Be Wrong Again?

Nate Silver: “My personal view of the race is pretty well aligned with the FiveThirtyEight Deluxe model. The polls could very well be biased against Republicans again. The best reason to think so is probably the ‘Nathan Redd’ argument that as polling gets more difficult, you should put more faith in the fundamentals. Usually, the president’s party has a rough midterm, especially when the president has a 42 percent approval rating and inflation is at 8.2 percent.”

“But it’s not hard to imagine how the polls could be biased against Democrats instead. After 2016 and 2020, pollsters face more reputational risk from again missing high on Democrats than the other way around, and that could consciously or unconsciously affect decisions they make at the margin, or even which polls they release to the public. Moreover, the composition of polling averages has considerably changed, with fewer ‘gold standard’ polls and more quick-and-dirty ones that tend to show more favorable results for Republicans.”