Are Polls Understanding Republicans’ Support?

Over the last three months, political journalists have been reporting a trend toward Democrats. The Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade, they have reported, has provided increased motivation for Democrats to turn out and vote. The easing of gas prices from their springtime peak has reduced concern about out-of-control inflation. Biden administration legislative victories have raised Democrats’ morale.

These are plausible points, validated by polling showing Republicans’ 3-4 percentage point advantage in the generic vote for the House collapsed to a dead heat in August, and also by summer polling showing Republicans trailing in every Democratic-held Senate race and in Republican seats in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

“Why things may really be different for this midterm election,” reads the headline of a mid-September analysis by the New York Times’ Nate Cohn.

But developments since he wrote, and recent history, throw his tentative conclusion into doubt.

Recent developments include polling in nine of 11 close Senate races moved toward Republicans in the month ending Sept. 22. Specifically, polls now have Sen. Ron Johnson ahead in Wisconsin, Republican challenger Adam Laxalt leading in Nevada, and Republican challenger Herschel Walker behind in Georgia by only 0.3 points in the averages.

Each trend is plausible. Johnson won in 2016 despite trailing in 29 of 30 preelection polls. Nevada has many Hispanic voters (17% of the electorate in 2020), who have been trending Republican nationally, and its relatively downscale Asian population (7%) may be headed that way as well. Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA) won his seat in a January 2021 runoff in which Trump’s criticism of the state’s election system depressed Republican turnout.

A chart prepared by Andrew Prokop of Vox of 48 close (within 10 points) Senate elections from 2014 to 2020 showed eight elections in which polling understated Democratic candidates’ margins by an average of 1.8 percentage points and 40 elections in which polling understated Republicans’ margins by an average of 5 percentage points.

That trend seems to be continuing. And as Cohn notes, “Democratic Senate candidates are outrunning expectations in the same places where the polls overestimated Mr. Biden in 2020 and (Hillary) Clinton in 2016.”

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