John Harris: “Conservatives generally have low demands and low expectations of government. There are some non-negotiable items that GOP leaders must accommodate — business supporters demand low regulation and social activists demand opposition to legal abortion. But, especially in the Trump era, what partisans want most of all is a leader who gives voice to the contempt they feel toward liberals, the media and assorted cultural elites. This is a bar Trump easily cleared.”

“Progressives, by contrast, have high demands for activist government. There is a long roster of specific items that they want enacted, expanding government’s role in health care, education, income equality and transitioning to a low-carbon energy future. This is a bar that Biden cannot easily clear, especially without robust Democratic majorities in Congress.”

“This touches on something about progressives that goes even deeper: They may just be wired differently, in ways that don’t correlate to uncritical support of party leaders.”

Monkey Cage: “Obama’s approval rating barely budged even as consumer sentiment rebounded from its low point during the Great Recession of 2008 to 2009. Trump’s approval rating was chronically low despite high levels of consumer sentiment, and it did not drop any lower even when consumer sentiment decreased during the recession induced by the covid-19 pandemic.”

“This curious feature of the Obama and Trump presidencies has been documented in political science research. One explanation is that in an era of strong partisanship, it’s harder for presidents to win over many opposite-party voters in periods of economic growth, or lose the support of their own party’s voters in a recession.”

“But Biden’s presidency looks different, at least so far. As consumer sentiment has dropped, Biden’s approval rating has dropped with it.”

A must-read: Strength in Numbers: How Polls Work and Why We Need Them by G. Elliott Morris.

In defense of public opinion polls.

Strength in Numbers

How Polls Work and Why We Need Them

by G. Elliott Morris · W. W. Norton & Company · 2022

Buy on AmazonSave to reading list

Hardcover·Kindle

National Journal: “What has changed? Polarization—at two levels. Gerrymandering has reached new heights, with a Republican-favoring map set for the 2022 elections that has fewer competitive seats than we’ve seen in decades. That the map generally favors Republicans is not new—Democrats have long needed to maintain an advantage on the generic-ballot question to overcome the reality that more districts favor Republicans than Democrats.”

“The new part is how few competitive races are actually left, as the number of competitive districts has been trending downward for the last 30 years. The Cook Political Report with Amy Walter lists 55 districts in competitive territory for 2022—down from to 75 in 2018. Moreover, in 2018, only five of those 75 districts were Democrat-held, meaning Democrats had a lot more to gain than lose. In 2022, the script is flipped: 41 of the 55 are held by Democrats, making significant Republican gains possible—but not to the degree of the Democratic gains in 2018. As Charlie Cook has noted, predictions of massive Republican gains are unrealistic, given that the GOP already begins the game with 212 seats.”

“The second piece of the polarization equation as it relates to the generic ballot is how survey responses reflect partisanship. Discussions about presidential job approval are instructive here: At first it seemed that chronically low approval ratings were a problem unique to former President Trump, but Joe Biden quickly wore out his honeymoon, and himself settled into Trump-level approvals. It now appears that partisans are simply less likely to admit liking anything about the president of the opposing party than they used to be.”

Patrick Murray, whose final Monmouth poll showed Gov. Phil Murphy (D) with a double-digit lead in his re-election race, writes in the Newark Star Ledger:

“I blew it. The final Monmouth University Poll margin did not provide an accurate picture of the state of the governor’s race. So, if you are a Republican who believes the polls cost Ciattarelli an upset victory or a Democrat who feels we lulled your base into complacency, feel free to vent. I hear you.”

“I owe an apology to Jack Ciattarelli’s campaign — and to Phil Murphy’s campaign for that matter — because inaccurate public polling can have an impact on fundraising and voter mobilization efforts. But most of all I owe an apology to the voters of New Jersey for information that was at the very least misleading.”

Kyle Kondik and J. Miles Coleman: “While it’s hard to know specifically what’s going on — remember, we’re talking about pollsters trying to figure out a group that it appears disproportionately doesn’t respond to polls — it seems likely that, in 2020, there was an underpolled group that tended to vote not just for Trump, but for a straight Republican ticket.”

“Needless to say, this is an important group of voters moving forward, but it may be hard to account for them — both for Republicans dependent on their turnout, and Democrats fearful of it.”

Samuel Goldman: “The diminishing reliability of polls is bad news for campaign journalists and political consultants, but it’s good news for the rest of us.”

“Uncertainty about polls could liberate unconventional candidates to pursue ostensibly unpopular positions and novel strategies. It might also encourage turnout by keeping voters’ hopes for improbable victory alive. Facing the risk of massive error, even candidates who are heavily favored can’t take their core supporters for granted.”

Natalie Jackson: “It is increasingly clear that how a poll contacts people — formerly a key heuristic for assessing poll quality — no longer tells us what it used to about accuracy.”

“The 2020 primary pre-election polling task force report found that whether the survey was online or by telephone had no bearing on accuracy, and the new task force report presentation indicated the same finding. As a result of their own analysis showing the same thing, FiveThirtyEight has retired the landline and cell phone live-caller survey as the ‘gold standard.’”

“The field letting go of its attachment to one source as more accurate than others will allow other methodologies to become more prominent and encourage further experimentation with new methodologies.”

Nate Silver: “The changes we made to our pollster ratings earlier this year — namely, no longer privileging live-caller telephone polls — will have some knock-on effects on our models, since our models use our pollster ratings to determine how much weight to assign to polls from different firms.”

“And as I mentioned, while our models already assume that the errors between different races are correlated, those correlations may be even higher in an era of greater partisanship, so we’ll want to look at that, too.”

FiveThirtyEight’s “deluxe” model fared particularly poorly in toss-up congressional races in 2020, only correctly forecasting 37% of them.

Washington Post: “When GOP pollster Frank Luntz in mid-March assembled a group of Trump voters to find out why they were hesitant to take a coronavirus vaccine, he invited several Republican politicians to join him in the discussion. One was House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy — at the time also Luntz’s guest in Luntz’s 7,000-square-foot penthouse apartment in the Clara Barton building in Penn Quarter.”

“Luntz did not mention during the Zoom call that McCarthy was in a separate room in the same apartment.”

Salon: “On Oct. 15, 2018, HBO aired a VICE News focus group orchestrated by Luntz, which had been filmed three days earlier in Dallas.”

“Participants were chosen by Luntz, who also decided what questions would be asked. But what neither HBO nor VICE News told their audience — possibly because they didn’t know — was that Luntz was being paid by the Cruz campaign.”

Wall Street Journal: “Public opinion surveys ahead of the 2020 presidential election were the most inaccurate in 40 years, according to an expert panel convened by the main trade group for pollsters, which said its work hadn’t yet pointed to a way to correct the error.”

“In the aggregate, the panel said, polls overstated support for Democratic nominee Joe Biden by 3.9 percentage points in the national popular vote in the final two weeks of the campaign.”

“It was the most substantial error in polling since 1980, when surveys found it hard to measure the size of Ronald Reagan’s impending landslide and overstated support for President Jimmy Carter by 6 percentage points.”