2022 Monmouth University Poll Recap

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At the Monmouth University Poll, we have never shied away from taking responsibility when we’ve been wrong, so it only seems fair to recap when we got it right as well. However, more than taking a bow, there are lessons to be learned about election polling from our 2022 experience.

Most established pollsters only made minor methodological changes this year, in part because there is no clear evidence for a methodological fault behind the polling miss in 2020. Good pollsters don’t make changes to methodology based on a guess about partisan skew. After examining our 2020 and 2021 Monmouth polls, we made a minor but important methodological modification by simplifying our sample weighting matrix and a major alteration to our election framing in the way we present the “horse race” and likely voter estimates. CONTINUED

Patrick Murray, Monmouth University Polling Institute

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How Much Did a ‘Dobbs Effect’ Blunt the Red Wave?

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The expectations for 2022 midterms were set early on. The Democratic Party was expected to easily lose control of the House and potentially the Senate as a result of lackluster approval ratings for Joe Biden and concerns about issues like crime and inflation.

But then came the end of Roe v. Wade. Tom Bonier, a Democratic strategist and CEO of TargetSmart, determined that the Supreme Court decision on abortion was having a significant effect on voters and that there was a potential Dobbs effect that could increase turnout and combat the predicted red wave. After Democrats pulled off unprecedented wins for a party in power, Bonier’s hypothesis seems to have been validated.

I recently spoke with Bonier about his initial impressions of the midterm results, what impact he believes the Dobbs decision had and whether the polling was better than it was in 2016. CONTINUED

Nia Prater, New York Magazine

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“Voters Are Smarter Than the Media”: The Pundit Class Misjudged the American People

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For weeks, the political-industrial complex was sure that these 2022 midterm elections would be a bloodbath for democracy, a “red wave”—or better yet, a “red tsunami”—crashing over America. …

But that’s not what happened. Voters rejected antidemocratic secretary of state candidates, as well as the prognostications about what they cared about most heading into the polls. Perhaps Representative Ruben Gallego summed it up best when he texted me, “Voters are smarter than the media.” Indeed, just about everything the media suggested voters didn’t care about, they cared about passionately. …

The political-industrial media complex was wrong. You can blame polls for some of the faulty predictions; Trafalgar, for one, flooded the zone with junky partisan polls. But much of what happened looks more like groupthink that happens when you’re trying to make a supposition on too little information. CONTINUED

Molly Jong-Fast, Vanity Fair

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Steady 55% of Americans Support Death Penalty for Murderers

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The majority of Americans, 55%, are in favor of the death penalty for convicted murderers in the U.S. While this marks the sixth consecutive year that support for capital punishment is between 54% and 56%, it is below the 60% to 80% readings recorded in the four prior decades between 1976 and 2016. …

Partisans’ views of the death penalty differ sharply, with majorities of Republicans (77%) and independents (54%) favoring it but a majority of Democrats opposed (63%) and 35% in favor. CONTINUED

Megan Brenan, Gallup

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While Democrats may have bucked the national trend, Republicans still hold a large sway in GOP-led states

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In Democratic-leaning and swing states, voters last week delivered an unmistakable cry of resistance to the restrictive Republican social agenda symbolized by the drive to ban abortion.

But in red states where Republicans have actually imposed that agenda over the past two years, GOP governors cruised to reelection without any discernible backlash.

That sharp contrast underscored the depth of the divide between red and blue America and points toward the further partitioning of the nation into divergent, and increasingly hostile, blocs living under fundamentally different rules for civil rights and liberties. Last week’s results could simultaneously embolden red state Republicans to continue advancing the militantly conservative social agenda they have pursued since 2021 on abortion and other issues like voting and book bans – while also making clear that such an agenda is electorally untenable outside of those core GOP states. CONTINUED

Ronald Brownstein, CNN

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Bad Vibes v. Good Results. Lynn Vavreck on the ’22 Midterms.

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Dr. Lynn Vavreck, professor of political scientist at UCLA and contributing columnist to The Upshot at The New York Times, sits down with Jon to talk about 2022 midterms. After 2020, Lynn and her colleagues interviewed over 500,000 voters, leading them to conclude that our politics aren’t just polarized, but calcified. She argues that calcification has placed our politics on a knife’s edge, raising the stakes of every election and that 2022 was the biggest case of calcification we’ve seen yet.

Offline with Jon Favreau

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