Dueling Election Takes
Let the punditry begin.
The juxtaposition of these two assessments amused me.
Jonathan Chait, New York Intelligencer, “The Special Elections Tell Us Nothing About 2024.”
After some preliminaries,
It may well turn out that Biden can beat Donald Trump next year, and I obviously hope he does. But the Democrats’ performance in the off-year elections, and in recent special-election victories, don’t actually tell us that.
The most simplistic account from the Biden campaign is that the election results show the polls are inaccurate. “Voters vote, polls don’t,” claimed Biden-Harris fundraising email last night. Except, the polls predicting last night’s election results were accurate.
The same coping strategy appeared following the 2022 midterm elections. Democratic partisans have repeated their claim that polls showed a “red wave” that didn’t materialize. That’s not true. The polls were fairly good, it’s just that reporters and analysts disregarded the numbers and predicted a red wave would occur anyway. If 2022 tells you anything about polling, it’s that you should take the numbers more seriously, and the vibes less seriously.
Meanwhile, the Democrats’ run of success in non-presidential elections may be less indicative of presidential-election success than their hopeful spin suggests. As the party has grown stronger with college-educated voters and weaker with non-college-educated voters, one effect is that its coalition “is now better in lower-turnout environments,” as political scientist Matt Grossman notes.
[…]
Politico has a story headlined, “Why Democrats’ big Virginia win is also a victory for Biden,” echoing the Biden campaign’s spin. At one point it asserts the result in the state “shows that voters’ broad distaste with Biden’s presidency may not be as much of an electoral drag on Democrats as initially believed.”
Well, maybe the voters’ broad distaste with Biden isn’t a big drag on other Democrats. But it is definitely a big drag on Biden. And since Biden is planning to be the presidential candidate, this shouldn’t make you feel any better about his prospects.
Noah Berlatsky, Public Notice, “Elections are more important than polls.”
Some 48 hours ago, pundits were rushing to explain how, why, where, and exactly to what extent the Democratic Party is doomed.
[…]
Tuesday night’s results are difficult to square with the “Biden and Democrats are doomed” narrative. In an off-year election, with the incumbent president’s approval rating mired below 40 percent, you would normally expect the president’s party to be stomped, crushed, spindled, and obliterated.
But instead, Democrats did fine. In fact, they did better than fine, and then even better than that. Tuesday looked a lot like a blue wave, with Democrats romping to victory in blue and purple states and overperforming dramatically in red ones.
It’s difficult to predict what this means for 2024. But we know that in 2022 and now in 2023, Biden’s low approval rating appeared to be entirely disconnected from Democratic performance. That should at least give the likes of Silver and Yglesias a moment’s pause in their punditing of apocalypse.
So, as my quick reaction post from this morning indicates, my position on this is somewhat closer to Chait’s, although I find both headlines too strong. That Democrats keep beating Republicans, and particularly those in the MAGA wing, in elections is surely good news for Democrats. (Not to mention the Republic.) Ditto the fact that abortion now seems to be key to goosing their turnout rather than that of their opponents.
At the same time, yesterday’s results tell us very little about a Trump-Biden race, which is simply an entirely different contest. The turnout will be vastly higher. The candidates are already incredibly well-known. The central issues will be different. That’s to say nothing of intervening events over the next 364 days.
That some pundits are using current polls or these election results as evidence for their pre-existing preferences is hardly novel. It’s the way of the world. But, at the end of the day, polls are a snapshot of attitudes at a current time and off-year elections are a reflection of the views of an incredibly unrepresentative subsample of the electorate in rather idiosyncratic races. They’re useful as data point but trying to predict the results of an election a year out is not a terribly useful exercise.
Oh for flying flocks’ sake. Once again, I read these people’s articles or editorials or opinions (or fluff), and find myself exactly what they’re smoking or inhaling, and why nobody offered to share any with me. Sir columnist ,it’s way way too early, unless you’re only in this for the clickbait.
Oh but who am I kidding, we all know this is about nothing but clickbait for these slime weasels disguised as (purported) journalists.
ETA and yes, I understand that I’m insulting slime weasels by equating these people with them.
I think Chait misses something here:
There are a lot of crappy, biased polls being published with the apparent intent of shaping the narrative (that seems to have worked) and making specific voters discouraged and not go to the polls (did that work? hard to say if Democrats would have done better without the predictions of doom and gloom)
If you look at the more reputable polls with more track record, Democrats performed roughly within the margin of error. But you’ve got to exclude a lot.
Which is the exact opposite of the Nate Silver poll aggregator model, and the rest of the media’s horse race obsession.
All that said, I’m not too worried about the polling of Trump leading Biden in swing states, even though it’s a decent polling firm. I’m glad they weren’t voting on Biden yesterday, but I’m not too worried about that poll being predictive a year out.
Well, back in 1993 I was working on a bunch of special elections in Missouri. Republicans flipped almost every special election seat held that year. You could tell there was something up with the electorate. In 1994, Republicans won the US House.
Every election and every election cycle is different. But it’d be a mistake on the part of Republicans to blow off a series of special election results combined with last night’s results. I certainly hope they do. Pride goeth before the fall and all that.
Chait:
That’s not the claim. The claim is the pundit class predicted a “red wave” based on their bad polling analysis, arrogant overconfidence, and misreading of the electorate.
That is true. And there is no sign yet legacy media pundits have grown any humbler or more cautious in the interim, as Chait’s defensiveness and definitiveness shows.
The media Twitterati keep swearing they have the pulse of the people, even though election results keep showing it ain’t necessarily so. There’s no evidence Jonathan Chait and his press colleagues understand the American people better than Biden’s team or “Democratic partisans.” Of course Chat can’t admit that, hence why he argues against a strawman.
Says who? It seems this opinion lacks the same nuance as one declaring yesterday’s results predict a Biden 2024 victory.
It would be safer to say the 2024 vote will be shaped by additional considerations, including maybe some not yet known. But “entirely” different? Too strong. It is unlikely extremism, abortion rights, and the MAGA threat to democracy will soon recede as important issues.
@Gustopher: Right now Trump is a distant theoretical to voters. Once the real campaigning starts the voters will be reminded all about who and what Trump is.
I’ll bitch about Biden and his policies to any pollster. I’ll even say the democratic party is failing to do enough to help people like me. I sure as shit WON’T be voting for a republican though as I know they are vastly worse these days.
I voted straight democratic ticket for the first time last year and I did it again this year. Prior I had either voted a mix or even earlier (2000s) straight republican…
@Gustopher:
And Chait should be embarrassed about rewriting the history on this.
Democrats’ 2022 complaints weren’t just about the polls. It was about pundits like Chait cherry-picking data and amplifying low-quality polling to push their prefereed Democratic doom-and-gloom narrative, while ignoring data and high quality polling that told a different story. Just like they’re doing now, re: 2024.
Chait shows many of these legacy media types are incapable of admitting and learning from their errors. If Chait understands 2022 polling wasn’t so bad, then why isn’t he asking where the media’s faulty predictions came from? How does it never occur to him to ask how he and his buddies were so wrong?
Ego, that’s how.
I think generally its safe to say that the Democratic Party is much closer to the center of gravity of the American electorate than the Republicans.
Not that the Republicans can’t win since their base of strength is distributed in very advantageous way across rural states, and gerrymandering has given them control of key states and ultimately SCOTUS which issued favorable decisions regarding election laws.
But that just goes to show that winning for them requires gamesmanship, not raw popularity.
So 2024 looks to be a replay of 2020, that is, a tossup decided by a few razor thin margins in a few states, with the Democrat earning a clear majority of votes.
@Matt:
I think there’s a lot to this. Add in that a lot of the major Dem constituencies aren’t really focused on that election yet. Pollsters and political weirdos like us are, but Black Women, Queers and Unions have other stuff to do right now.
Hell yeah, we’re gonna bitch now so they don’t forget us, but once we have to get to it we all will.
@DK:
They pay no penalty for being wrong. It’s astonishing when you think about it. It doesn’t matter to their publisher, their public or themselves, that they are wrong. It may even benefit them.
I used to write the restaurant review column for the late lamented Richmond News-Leader. (Subsumed into the Richmond Times- Dispatch). I made an error of fact once, an error revealing my own ignorance on a particular minor point involving sweatbreads IIRC, and I had to write a 200 word apology, FFS. And I deserved to do it.
@Michael Reynolds:
Pundits are not paid to make predictions, but to get readers to read their column.
A restaurant review has more real world consequences, like getting people to eat at some restaurants and avoid others. The reviewers get checked by readers who take their recommendations, too. If they say the service at Mel’s is excellent and the food is fresh, and they find sullen wait staff and food that looks embalmed, they won’t trust that reviewer in the future.
@Kathy:
True, but still depressing. We should all be looking for answers, not just for clicks.
@DK:
I agree. (I’m not going to look up to see whether this criticism applied to Chait specifically, but I know there were many pundits guilty of it.) But there’s something else I noticed in that cycle was that even when pundits noticed a poll showing the Dem leading or neck-and-neck, they’d frequently make an assumption that the Republicans were going to outperform that poll. This preconception was in itself based on cherry-picking past cycles to create an imaginary “rule” that polls tend to underestimate Republicans. This belief was further reinforced by the fact that a lot of Democrats have come to accept it uncritically, and given that Republicans in general have long denounced polls as “fake news,” it creates an illusion of objective truth due to the apparent bipartisan consensus.
@Michael Reynolds:
Jeffrey Toobin appears on TV as a pundit with no one ever mentioning his previous history. Not even a “Jeffrey, please keep your hands where we can see them.”
If that gets ignored, what does being wrong matter?
@Gustopher:
I’m still trying to figure out exactly who it is who still participates in polls, and what the selection bias from that is. I’m rapidly approaching retirement age and eager to share my opinions with the world… but even I don’t actually participate in polls, and I don’t know anyone else who does either.
At WAPO right now:
Gag me with a spoon.
@gVOR10:
That’s grim.
Generally speaking, I’m aligned with the side of “pay attention to polls” but those NYT/Siena polls that give 22% of the Black vote to Trump are simply not credible. Trump won 8% of the Black vote in both 2020 and 2016 and I’m expected to believe he nearly tripled his support? Nope. It’s just an extreme outlier poll.