What in the world is AOC doing

[FBaggins]

148. The rest of the story matters

The latest poll was taken immediately after the decision (including a weekend day which is usually avoided). It was short both in terms of numbers reached and in days in the field (meaning larger MOE). It was clearly an attempt to get the first glimpse of the public's response to the actual ruling. And that change wasn't big enough to even say that it wasn't just statistical variation.

Yes - the earlier poll was a few days after the leak... so perhaps we could claim that it's the result of Dobbs. The problem with that is that we've seen dozens of polls since then and the big eight-point shift pre/post leak is not consistent with the rest of the data. It's the post-ruling data that claims to tell a new story.

Republicans could point to the Economist poll that had Democrats at +3 right after the leak and now show Republicans +5. Should they be able to claim that Dobbs has resulted in a huge shift towards them? Of course not. It's fairly normal noise and both of the common tracking/averaging sites (538 and RCP) essentially show the generic ballot as pretty stable all year long. The Politico poll releases very frequently and shows essentially no change over the last few weeks.