Poll and pundit watching: Michael Moore predicts the Democrats will win the midterms.

[lees1975]

https://signalpress.blogspot.com/2022/10/i-used-to-love-watching-polling-data.html

Don't get me wrong, I still do. But there's an element of unpredictability in polls, and it's been there since at least 2012, when President Obama won a solid, convincing re-election bid over Mitt Romney. Republicans were sincerely expecting that Romney would eke out a narrow electoral college win, based on polling data from Ohio and Florida that gave him a slight edge. But he didn't carry either state, in fact, he lost Ohio outside the margin of error of the poll, though Florida was much closer, Obama still carried the state. As it turned out, with Ohio, he didn't need it.

Democrats have a lot of reasons to be optimistic about their chances of keeping control of Congress, and expanding their control of the Senate. When I first started looking at the composites back in February or March, we were down by nine points in the generic ballot, and Pennsylvania was the only really bright spot in the senate races. But looking at the 538 polling composites today, Democrats lead the generic ballot, it's close, one point, but that's a ten point improvement since the low point last winter. The numbers in the senate races, if the election were held tomorrow, would yield a gain of three for the Democrats, with Nevada being the closest thing Republicans have to a possible flip, and I wouldn't bet on that. Beasley and Demings, in North Carolina and Florida, have moved the needle to well within the margins in their races within the past two weeks, and if they can pull it off, that's a net gain of five for the Democrats.

[Turbineguy]

1. I hope he's correct.

Putin will have a sad.

[OAITW r.2.0]

2. I agree with Mike. Polling companies haven't, thankfully, figured it out.

I expect them to be scrambling on 11/5 to explain the tsunami that they never predicted.

[ColinC]

3. Do you mean 11/9?

[lees1975]

4. I expect them to be scrambling, but more than likely on November 9th.

And what's up with NBC? The polls they quote run well behind the numbers on 538, and most of the other networks, sometimes even Faux. Are they being deliberately conservative so as to be able to come back and say they never claimed anything?

I've studied this enough to know that the factoring they interject can sometimes be deceiving. For example, before the Supreme Court leak on Roe, abortion rights weren't even polling double digits. Now it runs between 25% and 30% in most polls. On Santita Jackson's program this week, she had a guest who pointed out that voter registration among women has soared since the Dobbs decision, and has far surpassed the modest gains made by the GOP last spring. But I've only heard that mentioned once, on MSNBC, by Rachel Maddow.