By Glynn Wilson –

New York Times public opinion pundit Nate Cohn is at it again.

Never forget, he was the public opinion analyst who famously said in 2016 of Hillary Clinton, “She’s got this.”

He’s now writing an email newsletter called “The Tilt” for the Times, which went out by email Monday morning. The headline? “Yes, the Polling Warning Signs Are Flashing Again.”

“That warning sign is flashing again,” he says. “Democratic Senate candidates are outrunning expectations in the same places where the polls overestimated Mr. Biden in 2020 and Mrs. Clinton in 2016.”

Since getting it wrong in 2016 (we predicted Trump had a very good chance of winning that election), the Times created a polling diary to track the latest polls, including a table showing what would happen if the 2020 polls were as “wrong” as they were in 2016, when pollsters systematically underestimated Donald J. Trump’s strength against Hillary Clinton.

“The table proved eerily prescient,” he says.

Early in the 2020 election cycle, he noticed that Joe Biden seemed to be outperforming Mrs. Clinton in the same places where the polls overestimated her four years earlier.

“That pattern didn’t necessarily mean the polls would be wrong — it could have just reflected Mr. Biden’s promised strength among white working-class voters, for instance — but it was a warning sign,” he said.

Take Wisconsin, where Cohn says incumbent Republican senator Ron Johnson ought to be favored to win re-election. The FiveThirtyEight fundamentals index makes him a two-point favorite, but the latest poll has his opponent Mandela Barns a two-point favorite (within the margin of error).

Real Clear Politics

“Instead, the polls have exceeded the wildest expectations of Democrats,” Cohn says. “The state’s gold-standard Marquette Law School survey even showed … Barnes leading Mr. Johnson by seven percentage points. But in this case, good for Wisconsin Democrats might be too good to be true. The state was ground zero for survey error in 2020, when pre-election polls proved to be too good to be true for Mr. Biden. In the end, the polls overestimated Mr. Biden by about eight percentage points. Eerily enough, Mr. Barnes is faring better than expected by a similar margin.”

Yet Biden won Wisconsin in 2020, but it was close, 49.45 percent to 48.82 percent, with Biden winning only by 20,682 votes, 1,630,866 to 1,610,184.

But there is more to predicting election results than public opinion survey research, or polls. You have to have knowledge of the population and what’s driving them to turnout, and the candidates themselves.

Ronald Harold Johnson (born April 8, 1955) is an American accountant, businessman, and Republican politician, first elected to the U.S. Senate in 2010, defeating Democratic incumbent Russ Feingold in the midterm election when controversy surrounded President Obama over the passage of the Affordable Care Act. Johnson was reelected in 2016, defeating Feingold in a rematch.

In my humble opinion, Wisconsin voters made a huge mistake. Fiengold was one of the best Senators back in the Bush years, and should have been reelected.

Before entering politics, Johnson was chief executive officer of a polyester and plastics manufacturer in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, founded by his brother-in-law. He’s been a staunch ally of President Donald Trump, voting for Trump’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act in 2017. He supported Trump’s decision to end Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), launched investigations into his political opponents and promoted false claims of fraud in relation to Trump’s defeat in the 2020 presidential election. He has rejected the scientific consensus on climate change.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Johnson voted for the CARES Act, resisted stay at home orders, used his chairmanship of the Senate Homeland Security Committee to invite witnesses to push fringe theories about COVID-19, and spread misinformation about COVID-19 vaccinations.

In relation to the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, the House Select Committee investigating the insurrection revealed that Johnson’s aide Sean Riley texted Chris Hodgson, an aide to Vice President Mike Pence, to request that Johnson personally give Pence an envelope containing alternate electors for Michigan and Wisconsin, which were later determined to be fraudulent. Hodgson refused to do so.

In March 2022, Johnson’s campaign hired Pam Travis as a full-time aide, although she had signed a statement as one of Wisconsin’s 10 “fake electors,” who challenged the legitimacy of the state’s delegation to the Electoral College. While walking outside the Capitol and pretending to be on a phone call, Johnson claimed he was not aware of the contents of the envelope.

In February 2021, Johnson pushed conspiracy theories about the U.S. Capitol attack, at one point blaming Nancy Pelosi. He argued that she sought a second impeachment of Trump to “deflect” from “what [she] knew and when [she] knew it” … whatever that was supposed to mean.

Johnson voted for a measure declaring that Trump’s impeachment over his role in inciting the storming of the Capitol was “unconstitutional.” He later voted to acquit Trump.

After Trump’s acquittal, Johnson downplayed the storming of the Capitol on a conservative talk show, saying of the attack, “To call that an armed insurrection, it was the most pitiful armed insurrection anybody could ever possibly imagine.” Politifact rated Johnson’s statement a “Pants on Fire” falsehood.

Although 140 police officers were injured in the attack, Johnson added in a March 2021 radio interview that he hadn’t been concerned for his safety when rioters stormed the Capitol because they “loved their country,” but that he might have been concerned if the rioters had been from Black Lives Matter or Antifa. Responding to bipartisan criticism of his comment as racist, Johnson said, “I completely did not anticipate that anybody could interpret what I said as racist. It’s not.”

In May 2021, Johnson voted against creating a bipartisan January 6 commission. Repeating a conspiracy theory, in August 2021, Johnson suggested that the FBI must have had more foreknowledge than has been disclosed about the Capitol attack. A spokesperson for Johnson said, “the revelation of the depth of the FBI’s involvement in the Governor Whitmer plot raises questions as to whether it had infiltrated January 6 agitator groups as well.”

Mandela Barnes, on the other hand, the first African American to serve as Wisconsin’s lieutenant governor, publicly supports a woman’s right to choose, Medicare for all, a Green New Deal, legalizing marijuana and eliminating the U.S. Senate filibuster. Barnes was appointed Chair of the Governor’s Task Force on Climate change in October 2019, serving Democratic Governor Tony Evers. In December 2020, the Task Force released its report containing 55 policy recommendations to address climate change in the state. If elected, he would be the first Black person to represent Wisconsin in the U.S. Senate.

The problem for Barnes is that Wisconsin is a state that is 80 percent white, although it is less white than it was in 2010 and many of the new residents are Hispanic. The population is also more old than young, who seem to be moving out of the cold state. So it could be an uphill climb for him, unless he can energize enough voters against Johnson’s support of Trump, get women to turn out in above average numbers, and reach college educated Republicans and some white, working class voters. He has the support of the state’s unions, which are a political force in Wisconsin since the last Republican governor’s public attempt to put them out of business.

Changing Population: Wisconsin

Back to Cohn

“The Wisconsin data is just one example of a broader pattern across the battlegrounds,” Cohn says. “The more the polls overestimated Mr. Biden last time, the better Democrats seem to be doing relative to expectations. And conversely, Democrats are posting less impressive numbers in some of the states where the polls were fairly accurate two years ago, like Georgia.”

“If you put this relationship on a chart,” he says, “you see a consistent link between Democratic strength today and polling error two years ago. It raises the possibility that the apparent Democratic strength in Wisconsin and elsewhere is a mirage — an artifact of persistent and unaddressed biases in survey research.”

If the polls are wrong yet again, he says, it will not be hard to explain. Most pollsters haven’t made significant methodological changes since the last election. The major polling community post-mortem declared that it was “impossible” to definitively ascertain what went wrong in the 2020 election.

The pattern of Democratic strength isn’t the only sign that the polls might still be off in similar ways, he says. Since the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision on abortion, some pollsters have said they’re seeing the familiar signs of nonresponse bias — when people who don’t respond to a poll are meaningfully different from those who participate — creeping back into their surveys.

The term has fallen out of favor, but back in the 1990s we referred to this as “stealth campaigns,” when Republicans like Fob James in Alabama urged his supporters not to take phone calls or answer questions from pollsters.

Brian Stryker, a partner at Impact Research (Mr. Biden is a client), said that his polling firm was getting “a ton of Democratic responses” in recent surveys, especially in “the familiar places” where the polls have erred in recent cycles.

“None of this means the polls are destined to be as wrong as they were in 2020,” Cohn says. “Some of the polling challenges in 2020 might have since subsided, such as the greater likelihood that liberals were at home (and thus more likely to take polls) during the pandemic.”

And historically, it has been hard to anticipate polling error simply by looking at the error from the previous cycle, he said, for example, since “the polls in 2018 weren’t so bad.”

Some pollsters are making efforts to deal with the challenge. Mr. Stryker said his firm was “restricting the number of Democratic primary voters, early voters and other super-engaged Democrats” in their surveys. The New York Times/Siena College polls take similar steps.

But could that attempted correction actually cause pollsters to miss the election excitement and motivation on the part of voters to turn out on Election Day?

“If the polls are just as wrong as they were in 2020, the race for the Senate looks very different,” he says, than it is finally being portrayed, I say, giving Democrats a solid chance to hold onto a majority, at least in the Senate. This has only changed in very recent stories. For much of the past year, most mainstream news outlets reported it was a historical foregone conclusion that the Republicans would take the House and the Senate simply based on Biden’s low public approval numbers and historical precedent in midterm elections, without any real current on the ground data to back it up.

If the corrections Cohn is advocating are taken into account in the forecast, he says, “the apparent Democratic edge in Senate races in Wisconsin, North Carolina and Ohio would evaporate. To take the chamber, Republicans would need any two of Georgia, Arizona, Nevada or Pennsylvania. With Democrats today well ahead in Pennsylvania and Arizona, the fight for control of the chamber would come down to very close races in Nevada and Georgia.”

Georgia

One has to wonder how in the world Republican Herschel Walker is even in this race, considering his crazy statements and actions, even more crazy than Trump.

But according to FiveThirtyEight, the race is still in a dead heat and too close to call.

“After a history-making 2020 and 2021, Georgia is once again on our minds with two high-profile statewide races on the ballot this November: the U.S. Senate race, a highly competitive contest between Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock and Republican Herschel Walker, as well as the gubernatorial contest, a high-octane rematch between Republican Gov. Brian Kemp and Democrat Stacey Abrams.”

But interestingly, they say, these races have pretty different outlooks in FiveThirtyEight’s 2022 midterm forecast.

The Senate race is currently rated as a toss-up, while in the governor’s race Kemp is a clear favorite to win.

The Senate and House

“Regardless of who was favored, the race for Senate control would be extremely competitive,” Cohn says, adding that “Republican control of the House would seem to be a foregone conclusion.”

He could be right. But with two months to go, I still say the current state of the country and the political environment should favor Democrats and reality-based candidates over election deniers, climate change deniers and those who push false conspiracy theories.

I believe the American people who are sick and tired of the lies and want better governance are more motivated to turn out their voters on Election Day in key battleground states.

Besides, independent voters were watching the Capitol insurrection hearings this summer, and according to the latest public opinion numbers, they were moved in the direction of voting for Democrats in the midterms come November 8 because they now believe it has been confirmed that Trump is to blame for the seditious conspiracy and violent insurrection on January 6, 2021.

Independent Voters Moved by Capitol Attack Hearings: 63 Percent Blame Trump for Jan. 6 Violence

If I’m wrong, I’m probably moving to Canada anyway. Please vote.

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