Originally published 10/15/2022
Depending on how much you have been paying attention to the coverage of the midterm elections, you may be seeing different headlines, but any news source outside of BobsBlog.com will be telling you that the democrats are DOOMED to lose the House in 25 days, and DOOMED to either lose the Senate or be stuck again with 50 democrats and 50 republicans and Joe Manchin will continue his reign as the king of corruptive corporate evil for another two years.
They are wrong. This is why:
1. The polls are off - in the OTHER DIRECTION
The common consensus among everyone in the media and any casual political observer is that the polls are completely and totally biased towards democrats, and unless a democrat is leading by a billion percent in the polls, they’re losing. And to be fair, they have somewhat of a good reason to believe this, because in 2016 and 2020, we were fooled into believing that the democrats were way ahead in the polls, and reality came crashing down upon us when republicans did much better than expected.
In my opinion, there is very good reason to believe that the polls are not biased towards democrats this year, and may even be biased towards the REPUBLICANS this year. Both of the major polling misses that keep giving democrats goosebumps happened when Donald Trump was on the ballot, and every other election cycle (the ones without Trump) in the 21st century has not had a polling miss in the republicans’ favor nearly as large. In fact, many election cycles in the 21st century had democrats outperform the polls.
In 2000, everyone in the political world knew that the election would be close, but the polls consistently showed George Bush leading Al Gore in the general election by about 3%. If you watch old tape of election day 2000, people were continuously asking “What will happen if George Bush wins the popular vote but Al Gore wins the electoral college?” This was because Al Gore and Bush seemed to be tied in then-swing states of Florida, New Mexico, Oregon, Iowa, Wisconsin, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania, but Gore had never lead in one national poll. This gave many observers the perception that Al Gore might be president despite losing the popular vote to Bush (ah, those were the days…) In reality, the swing state polls were very correct, as those states were all decided by SUPER CLOSE margins, but Gore vastly over-performed the national polls and won the popular vote by 0.5%.
In 2008, Obama over-performed the polls and won the state of Indiana (yes, that’s not a joke; he really did win Indiana), even though John McCain was expected to win in that state, and Obama’s larger-than-expected victory is what led democrats to eventually gain 60 seats in the Senate and pass ObamaCare without a filibuster.
In 2010, Senator Harry Reid was up for re-election in his VERY SWINGY state of Nevada against a tea-party candidate named Sharron Angle. He never led in a SINGLE poll in the month of October, and yet Harry Reid still won. And his race ended up not even being very close (50.3% to 44.6%).
In 2012, we remember that Barack Obama easily won re-election, but what we don’t remember is that in the national polls, Mitt Romney led Obama during the entire month of October in the polls, and it was widely believed that Romney would win the popular vote and lose the electoral college. Obama only retook his national lead in the polls a week before the election, and still only led by 0.7% on election day. He actually won the election by 3.9%. It wasn’t even close.
So now in 2022, after two presidential elections with a major polling miss that destroyed democrats’ optimism, it's tempting to feel over-prepared for another disappointing night. But all the evidence actually points to this not being the case, or even being a polling error the other way around:
Special elections:
In 2020, one of the earliest signs of a polling problem came out of a special election in California in March of 2020. It was a district that Hillary Clinton had won, and that democrats had flipped in 2018. In mid-March of 2020, the pandemic had just begun, and Joe Biden had taken a massive lead in the polls over Trump. But, this district voted for the republican candidate, 55-45%. We didn’t realize it then, but this result was a clear sign of polling trouble.
So if we look at special elections in 2022, maybe we’ll see some signs of polling trouble. And the result is - the polls DO have a problem: They’re overestimating REPUBLICAN support.
In the New York 19th - Joe Biden beat Trump by 1.5%. There was a special election in this district in August. If republicans were going to take the House, they would need to take back districts like this. The polling in the district showed the republican winning big:
Data For Progress (August 17) - Republican up 53% to 45%
DCCC Targeting and Analytics (August 6) - Republican up 46 to 43%
Triton Polling and Research (July 26) - Republican up 50% to 40%
Public Policy Polling (June 29) - Republican up 43% to 40%
The democrat won the district by 2.4%. MORE THAN BIDEN in 2020.
In the New York 23rd district - Donald Trump beat Biden 54.5% to 43.3%. In August, there was a special election in this district. The republican only won 53.1% to 46.6%. That’s a BIG improvement over Joe Biden’s performance. And keep in mind, the democrat in this district was so unknown, he doesn’t even have a picture on the wikipedia article I’m looking at to type these results. And that guy did better than Joe Biden.
In the Nebraska 1st - Donald Trump beat Biden by 11.5%. There was a special election there two days after Roe v Wade was overturned. The republican only won by 5.4%.
In Alaska - which Donald Trump won by over 10%, Sarah Palin LOST to a democrat by 3% in a special election in August.
Now, special elections should not necessarily be seen as the perfect predictors of what will happen in a general election. Turnout is much lower in these elections, and it is very possible that the democrats are only being boosted because angry women are voting, and the republican voters who will turn out in November stayed home. However, this argument is extremely flawed, because republicans SHOULD be the angry voters turning out to vote in special elections to upset democrats. This is exactly what happened in Massachusetts in 2010, when Scott Brown fed off of republican anger over Obama and won a special election he never should’ve had a chance in. This is what SHOULD be happening right now, and the fact that it isn’t means that there is a hidden wave of democrats waiting to surprise us in November.
These special elections DO NOT indicate that democrats are going to win in a landslide, like they did in 2018. That year, they won the popular vote by 8.4% and knocked out over 40 House republicans. That won’t happen. But, these special election results indicate that the popular vote might likely finish very close to or exactly the same as in 2020. And keep in mind, democrats won 222 house seats in 2020 by winning the popular vote by 3 percent. If they can repeat such a result, THEY WILL KEEP THE HOUSE.
2. The polling lead for republicans is based on partisan polls that favor republicans.
Remember these two names for the next month: Rasmussen and Trafalgar. Those are two polling companies that have, for YEARS, given republicans huge polling leads that are completely undeserved. I think on November 9th, you are going to be seeing them getting dunked on when their predictions end up being very incorrect.
Unfortunately, in 2020, these two polling companies got really, really lucky. They had predicted that Joe Biden’s polling lead was not true, and that Donald Trump would win the election because of what they theorize as the “shy Trump voter” who wouldn’t answer the polls. This theory is complete GARBAGE, but because the polls were off in 2020, for a COMPLETELY different reason (I’ll explain why below), they gained undeserved credibility. The news media now thinks that these fake polls are credible because they simply made a guess, and happened to be right.
This would be like if when Alabama played Texas A&M last week, a drunk Aggie fan said, “I’m gonna bet $500 that Texas A&M will win.” Everyone thought that the Aggies would lose to Alabama by over 20 points. But, the Aggies had a much better game than expected, and lost only on the last play when they had the chance to win on a touchdown from the two yard line. Does this make the drunk Aggie fan credible because Texas A&M almost won? No, it means he got lucky. And these republican-funded polling companies got lucky that they predicted Trump would win, and he only came 44,000 votes from doing that.
So, now the news media is using these idiotic polls in their averages, and it’s giving the republicans a lead in the national polls that is completely undeserved. These polls are such garbage that in 2018, Rasmussen was the only pollster to predict the republicans to win the popular vote in the House elections (they said the GOP was up 46-45%). The democrats won by 8.4%. This year, Rasmussen, which is literally funded by the author of a book called “The Laptop From Hell” about the conspiracy theories surrounding Hunter Biden’s laptop, has a poll saying 52% of Americans want Joe Biden impeached. Judging by the fact that Joe Biden got 52% of the vote, that poll is downright ridiculous. And yet, when Rasmussen also came out with a poll still sponsored by the author of “The Laptop From Hell,” saying republicans are winning nationally by 2%, nobody in the media questioned it.
3. The 2020 polling miss was because of two things not happening in 2022: The pandemic and Donald Trump’s presence on the ballot.
In 2020, the reason Donald Trump over-performed the polls was because the pandemic resulted in more democratic-leaning voters staying home and answering the polls. Democrats trusted the science and stayed home to avoid getting sick and spreading the virus. This meant that when the pollster from Ispos or Gallup called, they were home to answer. Meanwhile, republicans who thought the pandemic was fake or overblown left the house, and when the pollster called, nobody answered the phone.
We can see this phenomenon most clearly in elderly voters. Because COVID is so deadly to old people, anybody over the age of 60 who was a democrat was going to stay as far away from anybody as possible. As a result, 2020 election polls showed Joe Biden winning older voters, which had never happened for a democrat since Bill Clinton won seniors in 1996. Most pollsters trusted this data though, because they thought older voters were angry at Trump for mishandling the pandemic. Despite Joe Biden winning older voters in the polls by over TEN PERCENT, Donald Trump won voters 65 and older 52-45%. And in the states where there are huge numbers of old people, this is where the polls failed the most:
Maine has the highest percentage of old people in America. Joe Biden was predicted to win the 2nd congressional district of Maine (with one electoral vote) by about 1%. He lost it by 8%. Susan Collins was also predicted to lose her Senate race by about 4%. She won by 10%.
Florida has the second highest percentage of old people in America. Joe Biden was predicted to win Florida by 2.5%. Trump won by 3.4% in Florida.
This entire factor for the polling miss DOES NOT EXIST anymore. In fact, in the polls that show democrats leading nationally by 2-4%, which would just about match their performance in 2020, they show older voters going republican, which, although we don’t like to see them doing well with anybody, the fact that the polls show it means that they are likely to be accurate.
4. The republican “momentum” with Latinos is overblown and based on bad polling.
One of the biggest stories the media LOVES to keep talking about is how the Latino vote is becoming suddenly very republican. And yes, it is true that Donald Trump did better among Latinos in 2020. But there are a few reasons why this happened that make it less of a danger than it seems.
First, Hillary Clinton did well with Latinos in 2016 because of her brand name. If you took a trip down to the valley in Texas, and talked to some of these low-propensity Latino voters, they would tell you: they trust a Clinton because Bill Clinton helped them out when he was president. And for a lot of these voters, when they saw Clinton on their ballot in 2016, they knew who to vote for. Joe Biden never had the same base of Latino support because he comes from a state thousands of miles from the border, where black people vastly outnumber Latinos. Joe Biden’s underperformance with Latinos in 2020 was partly because the election that it was being compared to (2016) was a tougher benchmark to meet with Clinton on the ballot.
Second, Trump did better among Latino voters because Latino voters ALMOST ALWAYS support an incumbent president by more than that president’s first time on the ballot.
One of the best examples of this phenomenon is this:
In 1992, when George Bush lost to Bill Clinton. Back in 1988, George Bush won the popular vote by about 7 percent, which in a less polarized political environment, gave him 426 electoral votes and nothing short of a landslide. That year, Michael Dukakis won the Latino vote 69% to Bush’s 30%, meaning that Dukakis won by 39 percent.
In 1992, Bill Clinton destroyed George Bush. He won 370 electoral votes and won the popular vote by 5.5%, which was a 12.5% increase from Michael Dukakis. So, naturally, you’d expect Bill Clinton to have done better with Latinos than Dukakis. Nope. He did WORSE. Bill Clinton won Latinos 61% to 25%, meaning he won Latinos by 36 percent. That was a smaller victory among Latinos than Dukakis, even though Dukakis got MASSACRED by Bush nationally. Why did this happen? Because Latino voters tend to be a bit more patriotic about their voting, and want to support their President. This is why Bill Clinton actually LOST Florida in 1992, even though Bush had been criticized for his response to Hurricane Andrew. Latinos in Florida brought it home for Bush because he was their President.
And in 1996, even though Bill Clinton had lost ground to Latinos in 1992, they came roaring back for the incumbent President, and he won Florida in a landslide 8 percent victory. In addition, he flipped Arizona (lots of latinos there) from red to blue. So much for Bill Clinton losing latinos for the democrats.
Here’s another example of this phenomenon with the Latino vote- but when a democrat was in office:
In 2008, Obama destroyed John McCain, winning 365 electoral votes (he even won Indiana!) and the popular vote by 7.2%. That year, he won the Latino vote 67-31, so a margin of 36 percent.
In 2012, Romney cut Obama’s popular vote victory nearly in half, and Obama only won 332 electoral votes (no Indiana and North Carolina). In almost every state, Obama lost ground from 2008, and was the first president to win a second term with a worse performance than his first election since Woodrow Wilson in 1916. And yet, Obama actually did BETTER with Latinos in 2012. He won a whopping 71% of Latinos to Mitt Romney’s mere 27%, a 44 percent victory.
The media wants to create a story where it doesn’t actually exist. And yes, there are some troubling signs among latinos in very specific areas, such as southern Texas. But any victory for republicans among those Latinos is being drowned out by the republican COLLAPSE among Cuban Americans in Florida since 2020. Those voters went for Trump because the republicans were successfully able to carpet-bomb the Spanish-speaking air waves with propaganda about Biden being a socialist. But all of that was erased when every Cuban American in Florida watched as Donald Trump tried to overthrow democracy on January 6th. For Cuban Americans who lived through or whose parents lived through the dictatorship of Castro, what Donald Trump did was indescribably horrendous to them.
In addition, polls of Latino voters, even by very credible sources, such as NBC, raise serious questions about the accuracy of polling showing democrats losing ground among Latinos:
Here's an example:
An NBC Poll came out yesterday saying that 40% of Latino voters believe that the 2020 election was stolen.
Uhhhh, what??? That doesn’t add up. Joe Biden won Latinos in 2020 by a margin of 65% to 32%. Although it is entirely possible that some latinos who went for Biden in 2020 are voting for republicans this year, the idea that a significant portion of latinos voted for Biden and now those same Biden voters believe the election was stolen is STUPID. What this means is that the polls have some serious problems among latinos that may indicate overestimated G.O.P. support in crucial latino-heavy battleground states like Nevada and Arizona (two senate races this year). Right now, in Nevada, Adam Laxalt, the republican, leads democratic senator Catherine Cortez Masto in most polls by a very slim margin. However, Nevada is a state where the latino vote plays a crucial role in the elections. If polls are showing overstated leads for republicans among Latinos, that may mean that democrats will win Nevada by more than expected in 2022, and will certainly win in Arizona.
5. If the republicans really had the national lead (about 1%) they supposedly have right now, they wouldn’t be losing in the places they’re losing.
In 2020, congressional democrats won the popular vote by 3 percent, which was slightly less than the 4.4% margin that Joe Biden beat Donald Trump by, but that 3 percent margin gave them control of the house and control of the Senate. Right now, the swing state polls all indicate very similar results to 2020. In Georgia, the democrats barely lead in the Senate race. The same goes for Arizona. They lead by a slightly larger amount in Pennsylvania. In New Hampshire, Maggie Hassan is leading her Senate race by 7%, which is exactly the amount Biden won the state by. While it is possible that the swing state polls are off, and the national polls are correct, it is MORE LIKELY that the swing state polls are accurate, which give democrats a big edge in the Senate, and the democrats have a well-hidden lead nationally that will show itself on election night and give the democrats both the Senate and the House.
Right now, the republicans’ supposed advantage in the House is not based on any polling other than national polls. These individual congressional districts have not actually seen many high quality polls conducted in them, if any at all in the last month. The news media is almost entirely relying on the republicans supposedly leading in the national popular vote and believing that it will trickle down to the congressional districts. But the polling in the senate swing states would indicate a larger lead for democrats than expected. And when election day hits, and the democrats win the popular vote, I think republicans are going to get shocked in the five to ten congressional districts that will decide the majority in the House.
6. Turnout is going to be ABSOLUTELY INSANE this year
In 2018, for the first time since the 1960s, turnout in a midterm election was above 50%. That election was, of course, the first election after Donald Trump was elected, and naturally, the political environment became a complete shitstorm of angry democrats, angry working class voters who almost lost their health insurance, and Trump’s base coming out of the woodwork because he was in office.
We all thought that was going to be the high watermark of midterm elections, and nothing ever like that could ever be repeated again for another half century at least. But, now, turnout actually increased in the 2022 primaries to above 2018 levels. Most political statisticians believe turnout could get higher than the 2012 PRESIDENTIAL election (54% turnout) or even the 2008 presidential election (59% turnout).
Midterms on average always have lower turnout, but if we were to take the very small percentage decrease in turnout from the 2016 presidential (55%) to the 2018 midterms (50%), and translate that to 2022, and assume the same small decrease, then we can predict turnout in 2022 to be a WHOPPING 61%, higher than any other PRESIDENTIAL election in the modern era, except for the last one, and higher than any midterm election in the history of the United State. Things are going to get crazy.
One important caveat to note: The biggest myth among Democrats is that they always do better when turnout is high. This is BULLSHIT. High level, big time BULLSHIT. Turnout does not benefit either party. The best performance in a presidential election for democrats since Lyndon Johnson’s dismantling of Barry Goldwater in 1964 was Bill Clinton’s re-election in 1996, where he beat Bob Dole 49%-41% and won 379 electoral votes. But 1996 had the lowest turnout of any presidential election since LBJ, at a mere 49% turnout. The third highest turnout election since Ronald Reagan was in 2004, when George Bush won 50-48 with 56% turnout. Turnout was higher in 2004 than in 1992, 1996, 2000, 2012, and 2016, all elections in which the democrat won the popular vote.
So then why do I mention this as a reason democrats will win? Because this high turnout means that the whole electorate is showing up to vote, instead of what happens in a lot of midterm elections, when the angry party out of power shows up and wipes out the president’s majority in Congress. And, the simple truth is: If the country was a state, we would consider it to be a very blue state. More people support the democrats, and if the whole electorate is showing up in 25 days (or earlier), it’s a very good sign. Will it be the blue wave of 2018? No. Will it be enough to keep a tiny majority in the House and gain senate seats? I believe it will be.
7. Yes, abortion is the new third rail of politics - and the republicans are glued to the train tracks as a train filled with angry women (and some men) barrels towards them at 200 miles per hour.
The new delusional narrative that the republicans (and now the media) is pumping out is that “the top issue for Americans is the economy” and that for voters who have that as their top issue, republicans are winning them. Then, the media declares the election over and done for republicans because of this singular statistic. This is stupid. With the exception of voters whose top issue is immigration, democrats are winning every other issue.
The economy is not the only root of the tree in the election, and has not been crucial for victory for quite a long time in presidential elections. In 2012, among voters who said the economy was their top issue, they went for Romney by 51% to 47%. In 2016, among voters who said the economy was their top issue, they went for Clinton by 52% to 42%. In 2020, among voters who said the economy was their top issue, they went for Trump by 82% to 16%! The winner of the presidential election has LOST on the economic issues THREE TIMES IN A ROW! And to add to the pile, John Kerry in 2004 won voters whose top issue was the economy by 80% to 18%, but still lost. The economy is certainly not helping democrats, but in such a polarized environment, abortion is going to be the bigger player.
Although single and personal anecdotes are not always to be trusted, but I have a friend who could be best described as a closeted conservative. He’s a republican, but not in an annoying or bad way. He’s voting for the first time this November, and he said that he would’ve voted for Greg Abbott, but is going to leave the governor’s race blank on his ballot because he is so bothered by abortion being banned in Texas. This is one person, but I believe that there are enough republicans out there who are going to be truly bothered by the overturning of Roe v. Wade. And they may not necessarily show up in the polls, because many of them may not be of the type of voters that pollsters are looking for.
8. The possible October surprises
The day I’m writing this, Donald Trump got subpoenaed by the January 6th committee. And for the next month, we are going to be seeing more and more news coverage of Donald Trump and his role on January 6th. When this is at the top of the news cycle, it hurts republicans HORRIBLY in the polls. Donald Trump is going to become angrier and crazier over the next month as the investigation continues to circle him. He is going to try and insert himself into the news cycle to distract from the subpoena, and I think that it may be something like declaring a run for president in 2024, or something similarly newsworthy. And if voters keep hearing about Donald Trump in the news until election day, the republicans are DOOMED.
I will not be shocked if I am completely wrong, and we find ourselves in the same stupid situation of watching congressional races in which we have polling leads slip away on election night. But I think I’m right.
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