I’ve done so many big picture posts in recent days I’m going to let myself do a more zoomed in one. In all the antic craziness of the last two weeks we’ve seen a number of people, either cheering or dreading, saying that not only will Joe Biden lose but he’ll bring down Congress and all sorts of down ballot Democrats. I believe, just intuitively, that these claims are almost all the product of media hysteria, in some cases fanned by Trump campaign trash talk. But if you look down at the nitty gritty of public and private polling there’s something more specific happening, a set of data mixed with non-crazy but still possible assumptions.
Let’s start with the congressional generic ballot. Four credentialed generic ballot polls have come out since the debate. They all show Democrats with a modest lead and that number has actually gone up a bit, though it’s hard to say whether that is actual movement or noise. But this measure shows Democrats in a solid if not wildly strong position.
What I have been able to glean from private polling shows a similar picture. Democratic candidates in key states are still showing leads in their races. Joe Biden was already running at least a bit behind a lot of those candidates and after the debate that gap swelled. But that was Biden losing support and the Democratic candidates holding steady. In general we see the same thing in the public polls. They are just fewer of them and it’s harder to find pure apples to apples comparisons.
As I noted yesterday, the gap between Trump and Biden that opened up after the debate seems to be getting smaller again. So maybe that bounce will fade in key states as well. Who knows? But the point is that there’s really no evidence I’ve been able to pick up that this has affected Democratic candidates at all. That is, in the polls themselves.
What has Democrats worried is that if Biden can’t either restore his campaign or be replaced by a more viable candidate you’ll have depressed morale among Democrats and a critical portion of Democratic voters just won’t go to the polls and lots of Democratic candidates will just get swamped by that drop-off in turnout. That’s by no means a crazy fear. But it’s not something you see in the polls themselves; it’s an assumption applied to them. That’s an important distinction and important to understand just what people are talking about.
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