Everyone seems to have internalized the habit of yelling about polls after elections, so it’s understandable if you didn’t notice that the good ones gave us a pretty good picture of what would happen in the 2022 midterm elections. As a pollster myself, I was frustrated by the narrative that […] Read more »
The Pundits Blew the Midterms. Who’s Surprised?
The jury has returned a true verdict: The press and the pundits, which forecast a gaudy red wave, got it horribly, terribly, magnificently wrong. … Instead of establishing a Bureau of Shame, a wiser use of our time would be to convince editors that the election-prediction industrial complex’s skills at […] Read more »
Some midterm polls were on-target – but finding which pollsters and poll aggregators to believe can be challenging
A prominent GOP poll said Democratic U.S. Sen. Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire would lose her re-election bid to a Republican. Hassan won by 9 percentage points. AP Photo/Charles Krupa W. Joseph Campbell, American University School of Communication Pollsters indulged in breezy self-congratulation in the aftermath of the 2022 midterm […] Read more »
The Pollster Who Predicted a Red Wave Explains Himself
In 2016 and 2020, Trafalgar Group did what many more other pollsters could not: come close to accurately portraying America’s support for Donald Trump. In 2022, the company’s polls once again showed a picture of Republican strength, helping create a widespread impression that a “red wave” was about to crest. […] Read more »
“Voters Are Smarter Than the Media”: The Pundit Class Misjudged the American People
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 […] Read more »
Where the NBC News poll got things right: ‘We have really strong tools to explain’ what happened
As Tuesday’s first results trickled in, Republicans saw their hopes for a red wave vanish, in what was a surprise to many onlookers — but not for the pollsters we work with at NBC News. Bill McInturff, co-founder of Public Opinion Strategies, Jeff Horwitt, senior vice president at Hart Research, […] Read more »