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Even Some Liberal Outlets, Polls Coming Around on Admitting Republicans Still Have a Midterm Edge

Rebecca Downs
Rebecca Downs  |  September 26, 2022 10:50 PM

Earlier on Monday, Guy highlighted results from a poll released over the weekend by ABC News/The Washington Post. Among key takeaways, it showed Republicans up +5 among likely voters, and President Joe Biden with an approval rating of 39 percent. However the mainstream media chooses to regard these findings, and many have sought to downplay the Republican Party's chances even, this isn't a one-time thing or just one poll.

Other polls are showing other good news for the Republican Party, with a small lead over Democrats on the generic ballot, to reflecting higher amounts of enthusiasm and likelihood of voting among Republican voters, to Republicans enjoying quite a sizable lead on the issues that matter the most to voters, such as economic concerns.

As Interactive Polls recently highlighted, there have been a series of polls conducted in recent weeks that survey likely voters, the importance of such a distinction which was emphasized in Guy's analysis. The polls included in the tweet provide a helpful range, from Republican and conservative leaning polls such as McLaughlin and the Trafalgar Group, but also Democratic ones, such as Data for Progress. 

That Data for Progress poll was conducted from August 29-September 15 with 4,258 likely voters, so quite a significant sample size. The margin of error was plus or minus 2 percentage points, so the Republican lead is within that. That being said, that 2 point lead of 47 percent to Democrats' 45 percent is still a 1 point improvement from August 12-28, when it was a lead of 46 percent to 45 percent. 

It's also not merely on the generic congressional ballot where Data for Progress shows Republicans in the lead. Multiple state polls show Republicans leading or tying in battleground races, including in Georgia, Nevada, as well as Arizona's gubernatorial race. 

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While the U.S. Senate race out of Arizona shows Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) ahead of his Republican challenger, Blake Masters, it's nevertheless a slight lead.

Such results are on par with those more Republican polling, namely the Trafalgar Group. 

It's not merely liberal pollsters that are making curious admittances. Writing for The New York Times last week, Nate Cohn made quite the acknowledgment with his piece "Perfectly Reasonable Question: Can We Trust the Polls?" 

Spencer and Guy had addressed how Democratic leads in polling could actually be a cause of concern, since such polls have been wrong before. 

That same week that Cohn's piece went up, so did one by Catie Edmondson, which brought up a concern for Democrats we haven't heard in many months, "Departures Narrow Democrats’ Path to Hold the House." It highlighted the dozens of retirements, with this particularly key paragraph summing it up pretty well:

In a midterm election cycle in which Democrats’ majority is at stake, the rash of retirements has complicated their efforts to hold the House, even as the political terrain has shifted in their favor in recent weeks in a surge of enthusiasm around protecting abortion rights. Instead of battle-tested incumbents, first-time candidates without the inherent advantages of incumbency — name recognition, experience and fund-raising networks — are defending the districts.

Of course, that doesn't mean everyone has been on board. FiveThirtyEight and Nate Silver have especially been handicapping Republican chances, and have been doing so for months.

One of their most recent posts on the homepage, from Friday, by Silver, claims that "The Polls Still Do Not Show A GOP Bounceback." In tweeting out his post that same afternoon, Silver added that the rebounds we have in fact been seeing, which again are coming from Democratic polls, "isn't evident yet and claims to the contrary are mostly just confirmation bias."

Many took to the replies to call Silver out, including this particularly thoughtful point.

Whenever narrow leads for Republicans or Democratic leads may get you down, just keep in mind that Republicans were not expected to win in 2016, that Democrats were expected to pick up many more seats than they actually did in 2020, and that Republican performance was underestimated in 2010 and 2014.