The 2022 Collaborative Midterm Survey from Cornell University — a poll of nearly 20,000 U.S. adults with large oversamples in California, Florida, and Wisconsin — was just published.

An interactive feature allows you to really dig into the results. Highly recommended.

New York Times: “Traditional nonpartisan pollsters, after years of trial and error and tweaking of their methodologies, produced polls that largely reflected reality. But they also conducted fewer polls than in the past.”

“That paucity allowed their accurate findings to be overwhelmed by an onrush of partisan polls in key states that more readily suited the needs of the sprawling and voracious political content machine — one sustained by ratings and clicks, and famished for fresh data and compelling narratives.”

“The skewed red-wave surveys polluted polling averages, which are relied upon by campaigns, donors, voters and the news media. It fed the home-team boosterism of an expanding array of right-wing media outlets — from Steve Bannon’s ‘War Room’ podcast and ‘The Charlie Kirk Show’ to Fox News and its top-rated prime-time lineup. And it spilled over into coverage by mainstream news organizations, including The Times, that amplified the alarms being sounded about potential Democratic doom.”

Wall Street Journal: “Across the eight most competitive races, Democrats on average did about three points better than the final poll averages calculated by Real Clear Politics. And a number of those averages camouflage a wide disparity among individual polls.”

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.”

Politico: “Some Democrats have fretted that Republican firms are deliberately flooding the zone for the purpose of affecting these polling averages — and the subsequent news coverage that comes with apparent momentum.”

Dan Pfeifer: “While I put nothing past the Republicans, there is no evidence to suggest the existence of coordinated efforts to rig the polling averages to create the false impression of a Red Wave. To be honest, this collection of clowns tends to commit their crimes in public.”

“But… creating a false sense of momentum is a long-running Republican strategy. Many Republicans believe the best way to win elections is to convince voters that you are already winning. The strategy is loosely based on the idea of social proof – people want to be with the winners, not the losers.”

Nate Cohn: “Way back in September, we noticed a warning sign in the polls: Democrats were showing strength in exactly the places where the polls overestimated their chances in 2020.”

“The pattern raised the possibility that solid Democratic leads in several key Senate races were a mirage — the result of the same biases that led the polls to overestimate Democrats in those same states two years earlier.”

“With the election only days away, that warning sign is gone: There is no longer any material relationship between relative Democratic or Republican strength in the key Senate races and the polling error from 2020.”

Nate Cohn: “Many stalwarts of political polling over the last decade — Monmouth University, Quinnipiac University, ABC/Washington Post, CNN/SSRS, Fox News, New York Times/Siena College, Marist College — have conducted far fewer surveys, especially in the battleground states, than they have in recent years. In some cases, these pollsters have conducted no recent polls at all.”

“And on the flip side, there has been a wave of polls by firms like the Trafalgar Group, Rasmussen Reports, Insider Advantage and others that have tended to produce much more Republican-friendly results than the traditional pollsters. None adhere to industry standards for transparency or data collection. In some states, nearly all of the recent polls were conducted by Republican-leaning firms.”

“This creates a big challenge for a simple polling average like this one. From state to state, Democrats or Republicans might seem to be doing much better or much worse, simply depending on which kind of pollster has conducted a survey most recently. The race may seem to swing back and forth, from week to week.”