. @cecilerichards reminds us that her mother Ann was elected governor of Texas 28 years ago with no polls showing that result beforehand.
“Polls don’t vote, people do.” Even truer in this year in which literally anything, good or bad, can happen. https://t.co/4UKHLRaS47 pic.twitter.com/rHkbyT1qUH
— laura olin (@lauraolin) November 2, 2018
Whatever happens, by this time next week, we’ll know.
Peter Hamby, at Vanity Fair, points out that at this point time, even the professionals don’t know — “Sorry, Pundits, But You Have No Clue What Will Happen on Tuesday”:
… Every piece of evidence we have about voting behavior during the Trump presidency—special elections in various corners of the country, public and internal polls, early voting data in key states—indicates that we are heading for a midterm election with explosively high turnout. University of Florida professor Michael McDonald, who studies voting patterns, estimated recently that almost 50 percent of eligible voters could cast ballots this year, a turnout level not seen in a midterm election in 50 years. Trump, in his way, is loudly trying to juice Republican turnout in red-leaning Senate races by demagoguing the threat of illegal border crossings, which happen to be at their lowest point in decades.
Enthusiasm in this election, though, is mostly fueled by Democrats. Aside from college-educated white women, much of the Democratic coalition in 2018 is comprised of voters—young people, African-Americans, and Hispanics—who don’t typically show up in midterm elections. And the main thing to remember about high-turnout elections, especially ones that bring non-traditional voters into the mix, is that strange things can happen. House seats once thought to be safe are suddenly in jeopardy, like Republican Steve King’s solidly red seat in Iowa now appears to be…
…[S]ince Trump took office, polls have consistently underestimated Democratic performance. “The polls in governor’s races, those special congressional elections, in the Alabama Senate race—on average they underestimated Democrats,” said Harry Enten, the CNN analyst, formerly of Nate Silver’s poll-and-data-driven site, FiveThirtyEight. “The error statewide in Virginia in 2017 was greater than the average error in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin in 2016.” But why? Northam’s pollster, Geoff Garin, said his biggest lesson from the Virginia election last year is that new voters are storming the gates in the Trump era and throwing turnout models out the window. Pollsters who aren’t accounting for the shifting electorate—a wave of new voters who haven’t been previously reached—could be making a risky mistake. “I think some polls are not reflecting the ways in which electorates are likely to expand,” Garin said. “Turnout in Virginia grew by nearly 17 percent from 2013 and 2017, with roughly 374,000 more voters. In our voter-file analysis, 30 percent of the people who voted in 2017 had not voted in either the 2009 or 2013 governor’s races, which indicates people were dropping out and moving away as well as dropping into the electorate.”…
Enten put it another way. “Response rates are trash and they are trash among young people,” he said. Pollsters are more transparent about these shortcomings than pundits, who have a nasty habit of taking individual polls, even crappy ones, and using them to make sweeping claims about the election. “Polls, at least in this day in age, are about as accurate as they had been in the last 30-40 years,” Enten said. “But as long as we recognize the potential pitfalls of polling and recognize they are just tools, then we will be better off.”…
You know who knows the precise composition of this year’s electorate? No one. Electorates mutate every two years. They get older, they get younger, they get browner, they get whiter, they get smaller, they get bigger. They respond to new candidates and shifting issue sets. Using past turnout patterns can be useful when modeling a universe of voters, but the polls cannot tell us with certainty what will happen on Election Day anymore. In a volatile environment where Trump has saturated every inch of our cultural fabric with politics, who the hell knows what’s going to happen? Maybe Democrats might actually win the Senate. Maybe Republicans will keep the House. Maybe Trump’s nativist final push will actually yield big returns just where he needs them. Or maybe not! Just let people vote. The only currency to cling to in the post-Trump era is that all bets are off…