With six weeks to go until Election Day, the midterms aren’t unfolding as we all expected earlier this year, when Republicans were better than even money to retake the Senate and a lead-pipe cinch to flip the House by a substantial margin. There are, of course, plenty of reasons you can cite for this change in the political climate, from the backlash to the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision to somewhat better economic news to Donald Trump’s continued presence on the campaign trail to bad GOP-candidate selection. It’s nerve-racking, of course, because with Democrats holding the slightest of majorities in both congressional chambers, very small micro-trends in just a few states or districts could have enormous consequences for the parties and for the country (the consequences extend, of course, to state-level positions, not just governors but election-supervising secretaries of State).
But as political observers anxiously parse polls and hold up weather vanes to test partisan winds, Cook Political Report’s Amy Walter offers another way of looking at this election cycle:
“In a recent op-ed for the Washington Post, political scientists John Sides, Chris Tausanovitch, and Lynn Vavreck write that American politics has become more polarized and calcified. Events and the responses to them from politicians no longer have the ability to deeply and fundamentally reshape our politics or political coalitions. ‘Voters and leaders in the two major parties are not only more ideologically distant from each other but also more likely to describe each other in harsh terms,’ they write. ‘In the fall of 2020, 90 percent of Americans said there were important differences in what the parties stood for — the highest number recorded in almost 70 years of American National Election Study surveys.’
“Moreover, they write, voters are ‘less likely to change their basic political evaluations or vote for the other party’s candidate.’ This calcification of our partisanship ‘produces rigidity in our politics — even when dramatic events suggest the potential for big changes.’
“In other words, if every election is an existential fight, then every election will be close. Or, as the Democratic strategist told me, ‘notably competitive.’”
If true, this would mean not only fewer “persuadable” swing voters to produce big shifts in the results from election to election, but likely a reduction in the sorts of “enthusiasm gaps” thought to affect partisan turnout patterns in the past. Elections would be more like a series of huge pre-mobilized armies meeting in a series of huge clashes with no prisoners taken (and little cooperation across party lines between elections). Even if that’s an exaggeration of the degree of gridlock from which our government and our electorate is suffering, we might truly be entering a period in which swings in party voting are limited. And as Sides, Tausanovitch, and Vavreck note, the “calcification” of party and ideological divisions can become self-perpetuating:
“Calcified politics and partisan parity combine to produce a self-reinforcing cycle. When control of government is always within reach, there is less need for the losing party to adapt and recalibrate. And if it stays on the same path, voters have little reason to revise their political loyalties.”
To be clear, very close elections can have variable outcomes. And in our winner-take-all system, the stakes will remain high. It will obviously make a great deal of difference which party wins the White House in 2024. Control of the Senate, moreover, depends as much on near-accidents of landscape than on the overall voting strength of the two parties, since only one-third of senators face voters each cycle. Democrats are benefiting from a modestly positive Senate landscape this year. Republicans should have a big Senate advantage in 2024. There is no guarantee either party can muster a governing “trifecta” in the future. As Republicans learned in 2017–18 and Democrats have learned in 2021–22, a trifecta isn’t all that if you can’t rigidly discipline all your troops all the time.
When white-knuckle time arrives just before Election Day this year, the odds are pretty good there will remain a lot of uncertainty about exactly what will happen when the votes are all counted (assuming we can get bipartisan buy-in on the results as officially certified, which is hardly a safe assumption at present). If Democrats managed to hold onto both congressional chambers, they may well feel vindicated by voters and go on to undertake an ambitious agenda in the next two years. More likely we will have a return to divided government and even more uncertainty and gridlock as we enter still another momentous election cycle.
>This CBS poll appears to use a weighting that includes MORE Dems than Reps (See the end of the file), so I’m confused by all the Lib spin that suggests this poll is biased in favor of GWB because it oversamples Reps.
>Of course, if the poll does not toe the Lib line that the race is a dead heat, then the poll is to be discarded – Sheeeeesh!!
Hmm, looks to me like, unweighted at least, it still favors the Republicans (by one). I’m still not versed enough in polling techniques to understand what they mean by “weighted” vs. “unweighted” — are the “weighted” responses the Likely Voters? How do they determine which responses are discounted? In any case, if the unweighted is Registered Voters, they’re still oversampling Republicans.
The increase in voter registration is great, but I fear it will be essentially defeated by partisan secretary’s of state in these various battleground states like OH and FL. There are many new legal technicalities which the (ironically named) Help America Vote Act of 2002 (“HAVA”) introduced into federal elections law. For example, there are numerous byzantine technicalities contained in HAVA concerning the proper form of identification to be used on a state voter registration form. I assure you that it is not the goal of Republican secretaries of state in states with large numbers of minority voters to increase the rolls of registered voters! I predict enormous election difficulties in these states on Nov 2, with thousands of new voters who thought they had registered finding out that their registration form was thrown out on a technicality, with no notice to them by the helpful secretary of state—–those are the kind of tactics that our friendly Republican Party will be using in this election, and all future ones.
This CBS poll appears to use a weighting that includes MORE Dems than Reps (See the end of the file), so I’m confused by all the Lib spin that suggests this poll is biased in favor of GWB because it oversamples Reps.
Of course, if the poll does not toe the Lib line that the race is a dead heat, then the poll is to be discarded – Sheeeeesh!!
If there is one thing history has taught us, it is that modern technologic changes often catch old disciplines with their pants down.
Polling is seeing one such blind spot come to fruition.
The data appear to show a major disconnect between what is really happening versus what is being sampled. A poll is a sample, and it matters WHAT it is a sample of.
The faulty premise is that pollsters are constructing valid models and carrying them out flawlessly. They are not even getting close in many instances.
The practice of calling voters and talking to those who will talk to you is inherently unreliable. It can only be made more reliable by sound methodology, and it isn’t there for Gallup and others, whose strategies are as outdated as the French post WWI planning.
This modern day polling Maginot line will fail as surely as did the original. Campaign Kerry is coming through. We have the numbers, and the registrations in key battleground states prove it.
The fact is we lost in 2000 because too many Dems didn’t register, didn’t vote, didn’t care enough. That is not happening this time, and any way you slice, we have at least 5 million more voters than they do.
We will win by 5 million.
I got to say that the CBS poll of registered voters makes zero sense given the NY Times article about the trend with registered voters at least in the battelground states. I mean seriously a 250 percent increase in Democrats to 25 percent increase in Republicans (which amounts to tens of thousands and maybe 100,000 new voters in Democrat heavy portions of these battleground states- remember most elections in these states with close margins will not be decided by more than a few ten thousand votes, and not several hundred thousand), and their numbers are at 8 percent more registered (not even likely voters) in favor of Bush. Does this sound off to anyone else? I know they say that polls undercount new registrants, but this seems out of wack with whats happening on the ground. Can someone explain the difference?