I try not to ride the poller-coaster prior to an election that I care about. That is, the rare election in which there are polls; in many there are too few polls to pay attention.
But a month out from the presidential vote when we're drowning in polling news, I think it is worth passing along Simon Rosenberg's analysis of what may be going on amid the deluge. Who is Rosenberg? -- he's one of the few Dem analysts and activists who got the 2022 Congressional contests more or less right. He didn't believe there was going to be a "red wave" sweeping Democrats away and there wasn't, except perhaps in a few districts in New York State and Cali where Dems weren't paying much attention.
He has a theory about what leads to dire polls for Dems as we approach the vote. Republican operatives can buy them ...
... Given what happened in 2022, it would have been wise for the polling aggregators and forecasters to acknowledge the rise of an entirely new type of polling, right wing “narrative polling.” There are independent media and academic polls, partisan polls by campaigns and party committees, and now a third kind, right-aligned polling. While there is a smattering of polls from Democratic and progressive aligned sources, they aren’t many, nowhere near the level of what we are now seeing coming from the right.
This close to an election spending money on anything other than things that help you win is an extravagance. Thus the right must view spending so much money on these polls as something that helps them win, which makes them a new form of partisan political activity not “polling” as we understand it.
It is time for national political commentators to acknowledge this new third type of poll - the right wing narrative poll - and to start breaking their data out from the independent polls. To be clear breaking out the right wing polls from the averages in 2022 was a central way I got the election right when so many got it wrong. The late independent polls in 2022 showed a close, competitive election.
The right wing narrative polls showed an election 2-3-4 points more Republican - a different election - and there were enough of those polls in the battlegrounds to move the averages to a red wave not a close election. Without those polls it is very unlikely we would have been talking about a red wave in the closing weeks of the election.
Given that the project to move the averages and create a narrative the election was slipping away from Democrats was successful in 2022, we should anticipate that the right will try it again this year.
What would that look like? We get a series of polls from these pollsters showing the election moving towards Trump perhaps 2-3 points in key battleground states, maybe nationally too. The polling averages will then start to move a little ... The right then declares their strongman is using his “strength” (not money, ads, debate performance, ground game, external events, the early vote or any other plausible explanation) to win the election, and that it is slipping away from [Harris]. The whole right wing noise machine then amplifies, and presto - another red wave! Trump is winning and strong, Harris is losing and weak. Energizing for them, demobilizing for us.
My emphasis. They want to scare and depress us and since they aren't very good at on the ground campaigning, they have figured out how to render polling averages unreliable. We just need to dig in and work this campaign in all our various ways.
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| A mixtion and a puzzlement |
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