Earlier this week, I urged Democrats and others opposed to the authoritarian GOP to generally take to heart the results of a New York Times poll showing President Joe Biden currently trailing likely GOP nominee Donald Trump in five out of six swing states. Even if we are very far out from November 2024, they still contained a warning about a race that Joe Biden should be running away with.
I stand by what I wrote, but I want to continue the conversation in light of some strong criticisms I’ve read of what we can infer from current horse race polling, as well as in the context of the off-year election results around the country on Tuesday night. To the first point — there’s a lot of great insight and wisdom in Michael Podherzer’s “Mad Poll Disease Redux” article. Podherzer engages a multi-pronged attack against not only the recent Times poll I wrote about, but about horse race polling more generally. There’s one basic, somewhat condensed point that really grabbed me — that such polling, and the media’s presentation of it as more settled and determinative than it truly is, runs the risk of making people think that the next election is set in stone, and that their own actions and votes won’t make a difference. As Podherzer sums it up, “And as long as we have more confidence in the media’s ability to see the outcome than in our own ability to affect it, we surrender before the battle for our freedoms begins.”
I think Podherzer’s point is especially important to bear in mind following a very good election night for Democrats this week. Governor Beshear re-elected in red Kentucky; an abortion rights amendment to the Ohio constitution passed by a solid majority; and the Virginia legislature taken back by the Democrats, befouling the image of GOP Gov. Glen Youngkin as some sort of MAGA-with-a-friendly-face middle-aged wunderkind. Collective wisdom suggests that the outrage over the Dobbs decision overturning the right to an abortion continues to energize Democratic-leaning voters, and that the GOP’s divisive attempts to turn Americans against each other are far from a magic bullet for the Republican Party (witness the Kentucky gubernatorial candidate’s attempts to undermine Beshear because the latter has stuck up for transgender youth).
All of this, of course, has provoked various major media voices to affirm that while last night may be good news for Democrats, it’s not good news for Joe Biden, since doesn’t all this Democratic success - largely predicted by polling, at least in places where polling was done - simply paint Biden as a huge but very real outlier/loser among Democratic politicians? This piece from the New York Times’s Nate Cohn may as well stand in for others already written and still to come. For me, coming so soon after reading Podherzer’s polling critique, it threw into focus the degree to which we all need to think skeptically and critically not only about poll results, but about how they’re presented in the news.
Cohn makes a basic point I alluded to above - that it does not necessarily follow from Tuesday’s results that Biden’s chances are better than the polls show, since a) the same type of polls that show Biden’s lackluster chances also showed the likelihood of strong Democratic performance this week and b) it is entirely plausible that voters might like Democrats generally but not Biden in particular. These points are true, I think, but the whole is presented as an objective analytical perspective that in actuality is only one part of a larger political reality. You could say that Cohn is simply doing his job — but this observation should remind us that others also have a job to do — in particular, the individual reader and the Democratic Party.
For instance, just as cold logic could lead us to conclude that Biden is uniquely screwed, equally cold logic raises the possibility that Biden might revive his chances if he chose to more closely identify himself with the cause of abortion rights. Likewise, as others have observed, there may well be a world of difference between a poll that measures Biden when his likely rival does not currently share the public spotlight, and Biden’s prospects when the media begins reporting on a deranged Trump out on the campaign trail. That is to say, there are both things that Biden might do, and things that will change in the coverage of the 2024 race, that could have a significant impact on whether Biden prevails in 2024.
Cohn makes some insightful points about the nature of an off-year election electorate, and how a presidential election year may well see an influx of less regular, pro-GOP voters. Again, though, the way that one processes this information politically hardly ends with accepting it as a settled truth impervious to human will or effort. Among other things, it is a huge open question whether such lower-frequency GOP voters will still turn out in such numbers — for instance, if Trump ends up being convicted on some of the many, many indictments he currently faces, or if the Trump camp continues to indicate that its plans for a new administration include whopping doses of military dictatorship.
The more Cohn digs into the contending forces leading into the 2024 election, the more you realize how much is truly unsettled. He write that, “The great question for the next year is whether these less engaged, less ideological, disaffected, young and nonwhite voters who don’t like Mr. Biden will return to his side once the campaign gets underway. The optimistic case for Mr. Biden centers on their disengagement: Perhaps he’ll win them back once the campaign reminds them of the stakes.” But then he goes on to note that “these voters aren’t just disengaged, they’re also nonideological and disaffected. The issues that animate more regular voters, like abortion, might not be assured to win over these voters,” and concludes that, “Mr. Biden’s path to re-election hinges on whether he can persuade these disaffected, less ideological voters to return to his side and then to turn out in his favor. Nothing about Tuesday’s results suggest this will be any easier.” This may be true as far as it goes; but it’s also entirely possible that other vital issues — such as the survival of American democracy — will be front and center alongside issues like abortion in the 2024, and will appeal to such “less ideological voters.” Again, Democrats still have time to find appeals that might yet resonate with those who aren’t responsive to traditional or mainstream party appeals.