"At this point, it’s too late to run away from who you are," a GOP strategist warns.
www.salon.com
A couple things at play. The Democrat party actively did what they could with money and votes to assure that the most insane Trump candidate won their primary. Now that they've won the establishment Republican party has little interest in supporting these candidates. Similarly, Trump only wants to keep his political war chest for himself. Last I heard the only money he parted with towards other candidates was against Liz Cheney. Money well spent I guess and clearly because of a vendetta, period. So now you have these barely supported Trump clowns trying to dial back how insane they are. It will be interesting to see if any of this matters in the final results.
Interesting GOP and Dem points in the piece that you had cited:
Ken Spain, a GOP strategist, believes it is "kind of silly at this stage" for Republican nominees to be scrubbing their websites of their own positions.
Spain told the Beast, "Unfortunately for all candidates, the internet lives forever. At this point, it's too late to run away from who you are."
Tommy Garcia, a Democratic National Committee (DNC) spokesperson, believes it is disingenuous for Republicans to downplay their positions.
Garcia told the Beast, "MAGA Republicans have made their extreme positions clear — there is no going back just because they have all of a sudden realized that they are out of touch with voters. Voters know exactly who these cowardly candidates are."
The thing is (and flashing forward to after the upcoming midterms) actual voters may have known who the candidates were and what they stood for at a given time, or were perceived as standing for... but pre-election POLL RESPONDENTS ? Very possibly not so much, or at least maybe not to an extent the pollsters can capture as they home in on the horse race over the next five weeks.
So once again pollsters are anxious about whether they have sufficiently corrected methodology used the last couple times out, when they admit they botched polls in some races by under-representing final Republican turnout during the polling season.
Democrats seem to be doing better than expected with voters. But if the polls are wrong, they could be disappointed in November — again.
www.politico.com
After 2016, pollsters said the problem was their samples included too few voters without college degrees. The polls were better for the 2018 midterms, though they were still too Democratic on balance. Then came 2020 — which was worse than 2016, and for which pollsters have yet to settle on a definitive explanation of what precisely went wrong. As a result, an easy fix has proven elusive. But pollsters have mostly agreed that, particularly in 2020, the surveys missed a chunk of Trump’s voters who refused to participate in polls.
The current 2022 polling is wildly favorable for Democrats. FiveThirtyEight’s “lite” prediction model, which is based solely on the latest polling data, says Democrats have a 79 percent chance to retain control of the Senate. That probability clashes with the expectations of both parties and most independent handicappers, who consider the battle for the chamber to be closer to a coin flip.
Pollsters also struggle with the fact that pro-Trump voters cannot reliably be lumped in with "Republican" responses:
Don Levy, director of the Siena College Research Institute, said he is being “as careful as careful can be” to increase the share of Trump voters, both in their sampling (who gets called to participate) and weighting (making them count for more after the interviews are conducted in order to fix their underrepresentation). It’s not enough, Levy said, to just call more Republicans, since it’s a specific kind of Republican whom they are struggling to reach.
“It’s not partisan nonresponse. It’s hardened Trump-backer nonresponse,” said Levy. “A small majority of those are self-identified Republicans, but a significant number of them are self-identified independents or Democrats. You can’t correct that by saying, ‘Let’s weight up the Republicans.’ That doesn’t work.”
Personally I think the pollsters really have had their work cut out for them this year.
This is a midterm after a redistricting, and after some special elections --some of which were for redistricted seats!-- that may or may not have captured the mood ahead for the actual congressional elections.
Throw in an ex-president far, far more visibly and politically active than our other former presidents have been in modern times. Throw in the fact that that guy is also in legal jeopardy and that his fans buy into the idea that he's being persecuted... but that some of the candidates he has endorsed don't even mention him any more in their ads or speeches.
To tweak polling for results of primaries and special elections in those circumstances seems dicey, never mind the "special effects" due to Trump. Also the pollsters still do struggle to capture more accurately the policy stances and likelihood of Republicans overall (and the pro-Trump subset) to show up at the voting booth, especially since Trump voters tend to refuse to participate in polls or just don't answer their phones, but possibly because in 2020 the party did not adopt any platform at all except to support Trump... even though it was making inroads in the court system that favored long time GOP platform planks including anti-abortion measures.
Finally, in 2022 there are special one-off features of the overall political landscape that are hard to figure with respect to overriding influence on potential voters: inflation, the Dobbs SCOTUS decision, the uncertain net effect of DeSantis' relocation of immigrants, the whole Mar-a-Lago documents mess, and now a populous state smacked hard by a hurricane landing in an unusual area, with the residents welcoming a quickly provided federal disaster declaration, but its congressional delegation meanwhile voting lockstep against bumps to FEMA funding -- on grounds the rest of the particular funding bill was "wasteful"...
So much emphasis on Florida in that set of factors, and yet one cannot discount effect on voters reading about all that as residents elsewhere. I'd not be a politician for all the tea in China, but even less would I want to be a pollster in 2022.
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