Voices: A shocking midterm poll that’s got Democrats terrified isn’t all that it seems

Democrats yesterday woke up to a New York Times/Siena College poll with absolutely brutal numbers for them – and great news for Republicans: among likely voters, the GOP now leads in the generic ballot 49 to 45 per cent. That marks a shocking reversal since September, when Democrats held a one-point lead.

The poll also showed that independent female voters had swung from preferring Democrats by a margin of 14 points to backing Republicans by 18. Meanwhile, 26 per cent of voters said the most important problem facing voters is the economy, and 18 per cent cited inflation; only five per cent of voters listed abortion is their top issue.

That is extremely grim news for Democrats, who this summer seemed to have drawn new support from the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v Wade: they overperformed in special elections in Minnesota and Nebraska, also holding onto a perilously competitive district in New York and picking up Alaska’s sole House seat. If these numbers are borne out elsewhere, it will signal that that burst of energy has run out.

More worryingly still, the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Consumer Price Index report found that inflation increased 8.2 per cent in the past year (though it rose by a mere 0.4 per cent from August to September).

Conversely, the numbers will put a smile on Republican faces. As The New York Times’s chief political analyst Nate Cohn noted, this is the fourth straight major poll – along with ABC/Washington Post, CBS/YouGov and Monmouth University – that showed Republicans have an advantage (His explanation and friend of the newsletter Shane Goldmacher’s write-up are worth a read, as are the cross-tabs).

That is not insignificant. Mr Cohn attributed the shift to inflation and recession concerns alongside rising gas prices. While there is some evidence that the latter are on the decline, the CBS/YouGov survey noted that Republicans are more likely to say that gas prices have gone up than Democrats are, which might make them more motivated to vote this cycle.

But the Times’s apparently seismic numbers come with huge caveats. The poll’s latest round only surveyed 792 voters; in September, the same poll surveyed 1,399, meaning its tracking value is far from perfect. Natalie Jackson over at Public Religion Research Institute tweeted that when it comes to polling, “you will see big swings when the total sample size is 792, your response rates are tiny, and you’re slicing pretty small”, and noted that given that Independent women voters made up about a sixth of the entire sample, meaning the margin of error is unusually wide.

Christine Matthews over at Bellwether Research, who was Governor Larry Hogan’s pollster in his 2018 reelection, also cautioned against overreading the numbers, tweeting that the survey pulled in 233 independent voters, around 100 of them female.

“This shift doesn’t ring true to me,” she said of that group’s dramatic swing from left to right. “It may be...but it may not be. 100 something independent women is too small to decide that.”

As she sees it, for different groups of voters, the election is either entirely be about abortion or entirely about the economy. “I don’t believe that the voters who thought it was about abortion rights/democracy had a fundamental change in their outlook b/c gas went up again.”