It’s looking like clear blue skies for Democrats as they fly toward the midterms, ready to land their campaign in favorable conditions. President Donald Trump, on the other hand, is piloting his Republicans through a turbulent cloud of his own making. Just look at those numbers.
Democrats lead the generic congressional ballot by 6.7 points, 49.2 percent to 42.5 percent, on the RealClearPolitics average of polls. And they are polling competitively in Senate races in Ohio, Texas, and Alaska. The Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini calculates that Trump’s abysmal net approval is eight points worse than Joe Biden’s at the same stage of the 2022 cycle, and seven points worse than Trump’s own before the 2018 wave that cost Republicans the House.
But, before anyone starts allocating committee gavels, please consider DAD. It’s a useful pinprick to the expectations inflation that has blown full-strength into Democrats ahead of many recent elections, and once again this year. DAD stands for Democrats Always Disappoint.
Its claim is simple and cool-headed: whatever advantage the party holds in September will have shrunk by November, because Democratic polling is a summer flower that wilts by fall. Taken literally, DAD is also wrong. But, as a rule of thumb, it holds up pretty well, and is a healthy vaccine when a pandemic of blue fever runs rampant before elections.
In August, Ruffini pulled 3,312 Senate polls from the last four election cycles out of the old FiveThirtyEight archive. He found that, in every cycle, the polls overstated the Democratic candidate. The average error ran 3.7 points in the Democrats’ favor, and 73 percent of all polls missed in that direction.
Nor is the error spread evenly across the calendar. It peaks at 5.9 points too Democratic in late July, holds through August, and settles at 2.6 points by Election Day. Many of the Senate polls now fueling Democratic optimism, in other words, were taken at the point in the cycle where Ruffini’s sample shows the largest pro-Democratic miss.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
