“Warning: exit polls are like online dating profiles. Things may not be as they appear. And they may break your heart.”
— 2016 Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook, on Twitter.
Very Few Quality Polls
For those looking for the latest midterm election polls, there are almost no good quality polls of the most competitive races in these final days.
No One Knows What We Really Think About Abortion
“BuzzFeed News analyzed 14 polls on the public’s opinion on abortion from the past four years conducted by a range of nonpartisan, advocacy, and media organizations, and spoke with researchers and representatives from eight of those groups. All of the researchers and most of the polls agreed: The public’s opinion on abortion is much less binary and significantly more complex than the national conversation about abortion makes it seem, and that accurately polling on abortion is particularly tricky.”
“There are many reasons for this… but three in particular: the intense emotional and political charge of the subject, the extreme knowledge gap surrounding the issue, and the lack of clarity on how opinions on abortion affect voting behavior.”
Why Forecasts May Be Underestimating Democrats
Nate Silver: “The fundraising numbers are so good for Democrats — and so bad for Republicans — that it’s hard to know quite what to make of them. From a modeling standpoint, we’re extrapolating from years in which fundraising was relatively even, or from when one party had a modest edge, into an environment where Democrats suddenly have a 2-1 advantage in fundraising in competitive races. Moreover, this edge comes despite the fact that a large number of these competitive races feature Republican incumbents (incumbents usually have an easier time raising money than challengers) and that most of them are in red terrain.”
“If Democrats beat their projections on Nov. 6 — say, they win 63 House seats, equalling the number that Republicans won in 2010, an unlikely-but-not-impossible scenario — we may look back on these fundraising numbers as the canary in the coal mine.”
“That data, plus Democrats’ very strong performances in special elections, could look like tangible signs of a Democratic turnout surge that pollsters and pundits perhaps won’t have paid enough attention to. Right now, in fact, the polls are not showing a Democratic turnout advantage.”
Watch a Senate Poll In Real Time
What Those Texas Polls Really Mean
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Democrats May Have More Polling Upside
Harry Enten: “What’s important to keep in mind is that district polls at this point in the cycle can underestimate the party benefiting from a wave election.”
“I went back since the 2006 election and looked at how much the polls from roughly within a month of this point in the cycle performed. (That is, polls completed from about 52 to 82 days before the election.)”
“The immediate thing that jumps out is the side that has won the national House popular vote has always done better on Election Day than the polls indicate right now. The average overperformance was a little over 3 points.”
New York Times Publishes Live Polling Results
The New York Times is polling dozens of competitive House districts over the next two months and releasing the results in real time.
Just fascinating.
Why Polls Alone Aren’t Good Predictors for the Midterms
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2018 Political Atlas
Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball and Ipsos have joined forced to launch the 2018 Political Atlas, combining race ratings and polling to track the battle for control of the House of Representatives.
Three Ways to Forecast the Midterm Elections
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The Difference Between Forecasters and Handicappers
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Making More Sense of the Generic Ballot
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New Poll Averaging Method Would Have Predicted Trump
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The Polls Are Actually Fairly Accurate
Nate Silver: “With the 2018 midterm elections approaching, we’ve updated FiveThirtyEight’s pollster ratings for the first time since the 2016 presidential primaries. Based on how the media portrayed the polls after President Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton later that year, you might expect pollsters to get a pretty disastrous report card.”
“But here’s a stubborn and surprising fact — and one to keep in mind as midterm polls really start rolling in: Over the past two years — meaning in the 2016 general election and then in the various gubernatorial elections and special elections that have taken place in 2017 and 2018 — the accuracy of polls has been pretty much average by historical standards.”
Here’s What’s Going On with the Tightening Generic Ballot
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What the Polls Mean at This Point
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The AP Plans to Replace Exit Polls
The Associated Press said that “it will begin conducting an elaborate election voter survey designed to replace the traditional in-person exit poll, which has been criticized in recent years for inaccuracy and failing to keep up with changes in how Americans vote,” the AP reports.
“The new AP VoteCast service, developed with NORC at the University of Chicago, uses a combination of online and telephone surveys conducted four days before Election Day and through the close of polls. In all, AP expects to conduct more than 85,000 interviews with voters for this year’s midterm election survey… That’s far more than the roughly 19,400 conducted by the exit poll in 2014… allowing for a deeper and more accurate understanding of the electorate.”
Why Don’t Democrats Have a Bigger Generic Ballot Lead?
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A Real-Time Polling Dashboard
This is great: Civiqs lets you track public opinion on dozens of issues, candidates, and campaigns, so you can see how events affect public opinion in real time.
The dashboard is updated daily with current measures of President Trump’s job approval rating, the 2018 generic House ballot, favorable ratings of the Democratic and Republican parties, attitudes towards gun control, and much more. There are no gaps between polls because polling is done daily. All of the results can be filtered and tabulated by age, race, gender, education, and party identification.
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