The big polling shift the final few weeks wasn't real

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Really important thread: We now know that the big polling shift the final few weeks wasn’t real. The polls were roughly correct before that final shift. Yet that fake shift set off a chain of events that may have directly cost the Democrats the House majority and 52 Senate seats.

First, when every major news outlet (including major left-leaning news outlets) is yelling “red wave” down the stretch, it suppresses the vote. The average person is less inclined to go vote for their side if they’re being told they’re going to get blown out anyway.

Democrats lost the Wisconsin Senate race by just one point. If the media hadn’t been suppressing the vote by yelling “red wave” there’s a strong argument to be made that the Democrats would have won that seat. That, plus the Georgia runoff, would be 52 Senate seats.

It’s also an easy argument to make that the Democrats could have won 218 House seats, instead of 215-217 seats (or whatever the final total ends up being), simply due to the media suppressing Democratic votes by yelling “red wave.”

But there’s more.

It turns out the Democrats won the Senate races in Pennsylvania and Arizona by five points each. And the polls told us that with a few weeks to go. But then the polls suddenly and falsely claimed those races were TIED, so we had to dump huge last-minute resources into them.

If we hadn’t been forced to play defense in Pennsylvania and Arizona, we could have put more last-minute resources into other Senate races.

And if we’d known we were down just one point in Wisconsin, and not 3.5 points, we’d probably have put much of those resources there.

The House math is always more complex because there are 435 races and at least 60 tend to be competitive. But the media yelling “red wave” and suppressing the vote surely cost us at least a couple of the tightest House races. And that’s the House majority.

Here’s the crucial part. We know Republicans commissioned bunches of polls in the final weeks showing them hugely overperforming. Only some of the media hyped these “fake” polls.

But around that same time, the real polls also went insane – and the media unanimously hyped those.

And now the election results prove that the legitimate polls were more or less correct *until* they suddenly went sharply red in the final weeks. That shift was imaginary. Voters weren’t changing their minds in those final weeks. Legitimate pollsters just started blowing it.

The question is why. A few weeks before the election, legitimate pollsters panicked and began changing their polling sampling or methodology in a way that was much more favorable to Republican candidates, and made their work far LESS accurate than it had been. Again, why?

There is *no* reason to suggest that legitimate pollsters, many of whom have reputations to protect or work for major universities, would ever tank their polls on purpose. I would never buy that. But what would spook them into mistakenly tanking their own polls down the stretch?

Something presumably caused the best pollsters out there to say with a few weeks to go “wait a minute, what if we’ve had this wrong all along, what if a red wave is coming,” and adjust their methodology accordingly.

Did legitimate pollsters see all the Republican-commissioned polls showing huge (imaginary) last minute Republican gains, and panic about their own polls perhaps being wrong?

Did legitimate pollsters just hear “red wave” on TV too much like the rest of us, and fell for it?
Or is it something more innocuous, where pollsters didn’t actually change the questions they were asking, but the Democratic-leaning voters being polled were just depressed and were telling pollsters they were less likely to vote because they were hearing “red wave” on TV?

We also keep hearing about how Hochul supposedly dragged down the entire New York Democratic ticket. But the House results in California are just as unexpectedly bad for the Democrats as they are in New York. Can’t blame Hochul for *California* elections.

If I had to *guess* right now I’d say that Democratic voters in New York and California got depressed when they heard liberal media outlets yelling “res wave” and stayed home because being in a very blue state makes people instinctively feel safer from Republican extremism.

Then there’s how the Republicans specifically focused on commissioning “fake” polls showing Hochul and Zeldin TIED. Hochul won by seven. That race was never competitive. She was never in trouble. But that false narrative presumably drove right wingers to the polls…

…under the false belief that they could finally get a Republican Governor of New York. That surge didn’t elect Zeldin. But it was enough to flip three tight House races in upstate New York. And you have to wonder if THAT was the goal of the pro-Zeldin polls.

At the time, I wondered if the “fake” polls were coming from incompetent Republican campaign strategists who wanted to make it look like their losing candidate was winning, to muddy the waters so when they lost the blame would go anywhere but the incompetent strategist.

But now I wonder if it wasn’t something more. The Republican-commissioned “fake polls” appear to have directly prevented the Democrats from winning the House majority and 52 Senate seats. Are we supposed to chalk that up to just dumb luck on their part? Maybe. Maybe not.
The answer is always in the numbers, and the ability to crunch them correctly.

There’s a LOT of research to be done here, in order to figure out who changed what, when, and why – and I’m not that kind of number cruncher. I would urge number crunchers to dig in and figure it out.

It’s not about this election – it’s over, and in the big picture we won anyway. It’s about 2024. The Republicans succeeded in weakening our 2022 wins just by releasing a bunch of polls falsely claiming they were winning. Whether it was strategy or luck, they’ll now try it again.

At some point in 2024 – maybe three weeks out, maybe in the primaries just for kicks – Republicans will flood the market with “fake” polls showing insane results. When it happens we’ll need the media not to take the bait, and we’ll need legitimate pollsters to stay the course.
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