Dark Economic Clouds Threaten Dems in the Mid-Terms
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To avert disaster, the Democratic Party must stop fretting about the message and listen to the working-class.
Polls, as worthless as they have become at predicting the outcomes of elections, can still occasionally reveal something useful if you look at the data wholesale.
It isn’t just that polls are almost always wrong these days; it is that they are engineered, manipulated models based on old random sampling methods which don’t work anymore and haven’t been replaced by new ones.
A poll- commissioned by a political party, candidate or media company- can be made to say just about anything. Re-wording a question can solicit both a “yes” and a “no” response from the same respondent, a phenomena with which polling companies are only too familiar.
Polls, and polling methods, tend to skew Democratic, over-sampling progressive voters and missing huge swathes of more-conservative and rural voters who are hard to reach by phone or online.
We’ve seen empirical proof of this in every election since 2016, and before. Pollsters missed Brexit before they missed Donald Trump. In 2020, polls were proven more unreliable than ever. In 27 out of 27 toss-up races Democrats were projected to win, they lost.
In 2021, nothing has changed. Popular New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy almost lost a reelection campaign he was always comfortably winning in the polls. In Virginia recently, the Democratic gubernatorial candidate lost in spite of polls showing him ahead the whole race.
No one can remember the last time a Republican candidate was predicted to win an election they later went on to lose.
Taking a birds-eye view of the latest polling, things aren’t going so well for the Democratic Party. 2021 hasn’t been an easy year for most, but for the Democratic Party in particular, it’s been rough: Inflation, higher fuel prices, a labor shortage, supply line issues, Afghanistan, new COVID-19 variants, resistance to vaccine mandates, and more deaths in 2021 than in 2020 in spite of vaccines.
There has been a spate of recent Democratic Party retirements in Congress, never a good sign.
