The Hill: Bad candidates and split tickets, not voter fraud, could lose key elections for GOP
The midterm elections are a month away, and already there are a few Republicans grumbling that Democrats might try to steal certain elections. While voter fraud does occur, in the vast majority of cases candidate quality is the primary factor in deciding who wins. And you can see it by the split in several recent Republican election polls.
Proponents of the 2020 stolen-election narrative claimed that voting machines in several states transferred votes from President Trump to his Democratic challenger, Joe Biden. But apparently the machines only transferred Trump votes, because Republicans did very well in the congressional and state elections that year.
No one has yet been able to provide any evidence to support the stolen-election claim — at least, no evidence that would hold up in court. Fortunately, pre-election polling doesn’t rely on voting machines. And while the polling industry has been going through something of an existential crisis over how to better predict election outcomes, polls rely on voter responses, not voting machines. And several states are seeing a gap between certain Republicans running statewide in the same state.
Consider the recent polling in key states that have been at the center of the stolen-election narrative. Let’s start with Arizona. According to the Real Clear Politics (RCP) average of polls, Republican newcomer gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake was up an average of 2.2 points (between 9/14-9/26) over her Democratic opponent, Katie Hobbs.
By contrast, RCP has incumbent Arizona Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly up by 4 points over his Republican challenger, Blake Masters, for the same time period. That’s a 6.2 point spread between two Republicans running in the same state for statewide office.
https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/3673307-bad-candidates-and-split-tickets-not-voter-fraud-could-lose-key-elections-for-gop/