The nation’s mental health crisis crosses partisan lines

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In most Suffolk University/USA TODAY polls, public opinion on a variety of questions we ask splits along partisan lines. Democrats are yin and Republicans are yang. …

In this week’s national poll of registered voters, 80% of Republicans, 91% of Democrats, and 93% of Independents said that there is a mental health crisis in the United States. … Across party lines, the Suffolk/USA TODAY poll tells a story of despair felt by Americans who just don’t know when the madness of COVID will end. CONTINUED

David Paleologos (Suffolk U.), USA Today

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Five myths about the filibuster

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Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has thrown down the gauntlet, saying he will move to change Senate rules by Jan. 17 if Republicans continue to block the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Because of the filibuster, neither can be enacted without 60 votes in the Senate — and no Republican backs both bills, though all 50 Democrats do. Supporters of the status quo have their reasons, many of them caught up in myths about the history of the Constitution and the Senate’s role. CONTINUED

Norman Ornstein, Washington Post

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Failure and success in political polling and election forecasting

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… The recent successes and failures of pre-election polling invite several questions: Why did the polls get it wrong in some high-profile races? Conversely, how is it that the polls sometimes do so well? Should we be concerned about political biases of pollsters who themselves are part of the educated class? And what can we expect from polling in the future? The focus of the present article, however, is how it is that polls can perform so well, even given all the evident challenges of conducting and interpreting them. CONTINUED — pdf

Andrew Gelman, Columbia University

Note: This article is scheduled to appear in the American Statistical Association’s journal Statistics and Public Policy.
See also: My new article, “Failure and success in political polling and election forecasting” . . . and the tangled yet uninteresting story of how it came to be

The OPINION TODAY email newsletter is a concise daily rundown of significant new poll results and insightful analysis. It’s FREE. Sign up here: opiniontoday.substack

Idiosyncrasies of Senate Races Could Play to Dems’ Advantage

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… At this point it would seem to take divine intervention, Republican self-destruction, or both to save the House Democratic majority. With every seat up simultaneously before voters every two years, the House is an amazingly accurate barometer of the prevailing political mood—something quite remarkable given how few congressional districts are actually competitive in any given election. Just as the nation’s founders intended, the synchronization between the swings of the electorate and where the parties stand in the House is breathtaking.

With only a third of the chamber’s seats up in any election, the Senate is a different ball game, its dynamics far more idiosyncratic than those in the House. CONTINUED

Charlie Cook

The immovable Republican Party and ‘ink-blot politics’

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Supporters of President Donald Trump stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. It was an effort to stop the procedural certification of a presidential election that Joe Biden won and Trump lost. The mob was egged on by conspiracies and Trump’s lies about that 2020 election.

Those are facts. One year later, and a day after the commemoration on Capitol Hill of that attack, those facts should be indisputable.

And yet millions on the right do dispute them. CONTINUED

Domenico Montanaro, NPR News

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What Role Will January 6 Play in The 2022 Midterms?

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The following things can be true at the same time. First, the attack on the Capitol on January 6 was a dark moment in American history and one in which the former president bears responsibility. Second, the attack on the Capitol will not be a defining issue in the upcoming 2022 midterm campaign.

The 2022 midterms will be a referendum on the current president, not the former one. This is something on which Democratic and Republican strategists I’ve spoken with agree. At the same time, Republicans from swing states or districts who spend their time trying to re-litigate the 2020 election or defend those who attacked the Capitol are putting themselves in political peril. CONTINUED

Amy Walter, Cook Political Report with Amy Walter

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