In my poll-analysis columns leading up to the election - see here, here, here, and here - I focused on the statewide races and how we might expect them to break in the Democrats' direction if 2018 was going to follow the pattern of wave elections over the past two decades.
On the other hand, if your goal is to test how well public polls project election outcomes, it's almost irrelevant whether polls were "Right" or "Wrong" in what they were reporting, if outcomes diverge from them predictably.
In Florida, the most intensively polled race down the stretch, the polls nonetheless got the outcome wrong in both the Senate and governor's races.
In Tennessee, even post-election polls have found that voters like Democrat Phil Bredesen, a former two-term governor, quite a lot, so it's possible that his support in polls was just soft, and voters when asked to choose stuck with their partisan preference.
By contrast, the states where the wave broke more predictably had a lot of non-white voters of the sort who supported Obama but did not regularly show up at the polls in previous midterms: Texas, Arizona, Nevada.
Here's how the governor's races broke after mid September.
Doug Ducey blew open the Arizona governor race, using his popularity as an incumbent to dodge the wave that ended up tipping the Senate race away from Martha McSally.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/12/midterm-elections-polls-blue-wave/
On the other hand, if your goal is to test how well public polls project election outcomes, it's almost irrelevant whether polls were "Right" or "Wrong" in what they were reporting, if outcomes diverge from them predictably.
In Florida, the most intensively polled race down the stretch, the polls nonetheless got the outcome wrong in both the Senate and governor's races.
In Tennessee, even post-election polls have found that voters like Democrat Phil Bredesen, a former two-term governor, quite a lot, so it's possible that his support in polls was just soft, and voters when asked to choose stuck with their partisan preference.
By contrast, the states where the wave broke more predictably had a lot of non-white voters of the sort who supported Obama but did not regularly show up at the polls in previous midterms: Texas, Arizona, Nevada.
Here's how the governor's races broke after mid September.
Doug Ducey blew open the Arizona governor race, using his popularity as an incumbent to dodge the wave that ended up tipping the Senate race away from Martha McSally.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/12/midterm-elections-polls-blue-wave/
No comments:
Post a Comment