“Pollsters this year are taking a range of steps to try to improve the accuracy of their surveys, after significantly understating support for Donald Trump and other GOP candidates in the past two presidential elections,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

“Whether those steps will work is a subject of concern for pollsters and strategists in both parties—and no one will know the level of accuracy of this year’s surveys until the votes are counted.”

Nate Silver: “For the past few weeks, we’ve been trying to figure out to what extent, if any, Republicans have regained ground in the race for control of Congress. And the answer is… probably some, but not necessarily as much as the conventional wisdom holds.”

“In FiveThirtyEight’s Deluxe forecast, the GOP now has a 34 percent chance of recapturing the Senate. That’s up from a low of 29 percent in mid-September.”

“In betting markets, there’s been a much sharper shift. In fact, the markets have the race at nearly even, with Republicans having a 49 percent chance of Senate control. That’s up from a low of 33 percent in late August. The markets were in pretty good alignment with FiveThirtyEight’s forecast for most of the cycle; now they’re not.”

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (R) told Fox News that conservative White men are so concerned about being politically persecuted, they refuse to participate in polls, lest they be arrested by the FBI for their beliefs.

Said Huckabee: “If you’re one of those people, you’re kind of thinking that any given day the FBI may show up, bang your door down, and haul you in. If not, they may put you on a list, call you a domestic terrorist, a threat to democracy. So, conservatives simply don’t answer polls. So, I think we’re seeing something that really can’t be factored in.”

Nate Cohn: “In the poll we have in the field right now, only 0.4 percent of dials have yielded a completed interview. If you were employed as one of our interviewers at a call center, you would have to dial numbers for two hours to get a single completed interview.”

“The Times has more resources than most organizations, but this is getting pretty close to ‘death of telephone polling’ numbers.”

G. Elliot Morris: “Over the weekend, a new series of charts appeared on the webpages of RealClearPolitics.com, the right-leaning news aggregation website that also hosts averages of polls for upcoming elections. These site has been publishing averages since the early 2000s, and while they used to be a pretty comprehensive and fair collection of polling data I should note that the people in charge have routinely made some very arbitrary methodological decisions that have tended to have the predictable effect of skewing their numbers toward Republicans. This is why I have advised people to take their numbers with a grain of salt.”

“But the site’s new set of featured graphs makes me question altogether their broader commitment to creating comprehensive and unbiased aggregates of polls.”

National Journal: “The entire concept of polling depends on having a set population from which one can take a random sample and get a generally representative snapshot. Pre-election polls have no existing population—the election hasn’t happened yet, and voting isn’t compulsory in the U.S., so we simply don’t have a population of who voted until all the polls have closed on Election Day.”

“We can’t remedy that. The population of voters will never exist prior to the election. Expecting polls to be able to consistently, accurately predict an election is asking more than is statistically and theoretically possible. Yes, we (pollsters) have a lot of information from past elections to help figure it out. But it’s gotten harder to poll a representative sample of the entire American adult population over the last few decades. Just in the past couple of election cycles, we have seen candidates activate people who typically don’t vote, so is it really surprising that the error rates of horse-race polls have increased?”

Sen. Jon Tester (D-MT) has some advice for his colleagues after watching his home state’s former governor, Steve Bullock, poll well then lose badly in Montana’s 2020 Senate race, Politico reports.

Said Tester: “I don’t believe the polls anymore. I just don’t. After Montana: throw them away. I don’t think there’s any accuracy.”

“Pollsters know they have a problem. But they aren’t sure they’ve fixed it in time for the November election,” Politico reports.

“Since Donald Trump’s unexpected 2016 victory, pre-election polls have consistently understated support for Republican candidates, compared to the votes ultimately cast.”

“Once again, polls over the past two months are showing Democrats running stronger than once expected in a number of critical midterm races. It’s left some wondering whether the rosy results are setting the stage for another potential polling failure that dashes Democratic hopes of retaining control of Congress— and vindicates the GOP’s assertion that the polls are unfairly biased against them.”

Seth Masket: “I like to put together a little economic forecast model around this point in an election cycle. Not so much because I’m trying to predict what’ll happen — there are more sophisticated ways to do that — but because I want to get a sense of a baseline. That is, what are the fundamentals of this year? Once we know that, we can get a bit of a sense of how other variables — campaigning, candidate quality, etc. — are performing.”

“In 2022, however, what traditional forecast models are telling is wildly different from what everything else is telling us.”

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

• Amazon Kindle Edition
• Morris, G. Elliott (Author)
• English (Publication Language)
• 204 Pages - 07/12/2022 (Publication Date) - W. W. Norton & Company (Publisher)

Check Price on Amazon

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.”