Seasonal Polling Disorder is About to Run the Democrats Off a Cliff

In 2014, Democrats took a lead in the generic ballot in the summer and surged in August. Breathless Washington reporters claimed the GOP was suffering with bad candidates like in 2010 when a GOP wave failed to grab the Senate. Obama had the wind at his back and the ship of state was sailing forward.

In November of 2014, the GOP had a polling average of about 2.4% and the actual election result gave the GOP over a 5% win.

If you go to Real Clear Politics and seek out their generic ballot archive, you’ll see that in August, the Democrats always get a noticeable bump in the polling average at this time of year. There are lots of theories why. My personal theory is that in August, Republicans — the demographic most likely to have large families — are either heading out on last minute vacations before school starts or they are already (as in my family’s case) going back to school and getting into the new school year’s routine. They aren’t talking to pollsters.

On top of that, until right about now, Democrats agreed polling is broken and there are no good solutions to fix it.

According to a new report by the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR), national polls overstated Joe Biden’s margin of victory by 3.9 percentage points in 2020 — the largest error in 40 years. State polls missed too, by 4.3 points. And, for the third time in four elections, pollsters underestimated Republican votes.

Just consider this data point:

To complete 1,510 interviews over several weeks, we had to call 136,688 voters. In hard-to-interview Florida, only 1 in 90-odd voters would speak with our interviewers.

Non-white voters tend to not answer pollsters’ calls. Among white people, Republicans tend not to answer. As non-white voters move to the GOP, that makes the polling even worse.

At the state level, polling is notoriously difficult. Glenn Youngkin never did well in Virginia polling. Senator Tillis in North Carolina lost to his Democrat opponent in the polls, but won the actual election. Same for Ron Johnson in Wisconsin who beat Russ Feingold despite being behind an average of seven points in the polls.

In Georgia, in 2014 and 2018, at this time of year, the Republicans were losing to the Democrats in both the gubernatorial and senatorial polling. That makes Kemp’s lead against Abrams right now even more remarkable and suggests a blow out for him in November and suggests a Walker win, despite a media narrative that Walker is too bad a candidate to beat Warnock.

In Pennsylvania, that means Dr. Oz still has a very good chance of winning and it makes J. D. Vance a shoo-in in Ohio and Adam Laxalt the most likely winner in Nevada.

But for now, the public polling has Democrats ahead. The media has given favorable headlines to Joe Biden and the press insists we all talk about Donald Trump and Liz Cheney, not the economy. That’s gotten the Democrats comfortable enough that Joe Biden is about to scuttle the whole of the Democrats’ momentum. He’s going to announce a plan later this week to forgive $10,000 in student loan debt for Americans making less than $125,000.00 a year.

According to some great reporting by MJ Lee and Phil Mattingly at CNN,

According to multiple sources familiar with the discussions, the plan is designed to offer the forgiveness to individuals who earn less than $125,000 per year.

In addition to that baseline of student loan debt forgiveness for individuals who fall under a certain income level, administration officials have also recently discussed the possibility of additional forgiveness for specific subsets of the population, according to sources familiar with internal discussions in the administration.

First, the hardcore left is upset with this plan because it does not go far enough. Progressive activist Nina Turner calls it more proof of structural racism.

Nina Turner @ninaturner

Canceling $10,000 in student debt when the average white borrower is $12,000 in debt, while Black women hold on average over $52,000 isn’t just unacceptable, it’s structural racism.

But you know who else is going to be upset with this? The farmer struggling to pay off his tractor loan and the electrician who is paying off his van — they’re going to be pissed. This move will undoubtedly shift non-college educated voters to the GOP more rapidly.

But, on top of that, there are millions of Americans who did the work and put in the effort to pay off their loans. They’ll get nothing. People who makes $125,000 or less and paid off prior loans won’t see any benefit, but they’ll be subsidizing people who did not put in the work like they did.

It is arguably unconstitutional for the Biden Administration to forgive a loan based on a congressional appropriation. Perhaps the Biden team wants to play “blame the courts” to further energize their base in November. It won’t matter if courts kill it and that could turn off those voters.

But with the media telling Biden the wind is at his back and his polling is recovering, he’s going big and going for broke while bankrupting the country. The Democrats think their polling bounce has reversed their slide and “vibe shifted” the election in their favor. A basic understanding of history would let them know this is seasonal and cyclical and late September, early October, will show where voters are more likely to be, but will still undercount Republican strength at a time, right now, when Republicans still lead the generic ballot. And a recession is coming, if not already here.