That’s question Harry Enten over at CNN is asking this morning 50 something days out form the November Midterm elections….
He went back to 2006 and found the wining party from the midterms did about 3% better across the board from the polling forecasts in district polls vs other polling like the generic House polls…
The polls produced by Siena and the Times generally point to a House where Democrats have a slight advantage, though Republicans could still retain control. Some of the polls, like the one in Wisconsin’s 1st District, have the Republican ahead, while others, like in Minnesota’s 3rd District, have the Democrat up.
As Real Clear Politics elections analyst Sean Trende noted on Twitter in regard to the polls, they point to a Democratic net gain of 30 seats. This estimate is largely in line with the FiveThirtyEight polls-only (or “lite”) estimate of a gain of 34 seats for the Democrats. Both are somewhat more than the net gain of 23 seats they need to take control of the House.
These district polls, however, tend to paint a better picture for Republicans than other indicators such as the national generic ballot polls and the fundamentals such as fundraising.
Those suggest a gain of over 35 seats for Democrats.
In other words, there is disagreement.
What’s important to keep in mind is that district polls at this point in the cycle can underestimate the party benefiting from a wave election.
I went back since the 2006 election and looked at how much the polls from roughly within a month of this point in the cycle performed. (That is, polls completed from about 52 to 82 days before the election.)
The immediate thing that jumps out is the side that has won the national House popular vote has always done better on Election Day than the polls indicate right now. The average overperformance was a little over 3 points.
Democrats did better than their polls in 2006, 2008 and 2012. Republicans did better than their polls indicated in 2010, 2014 and 2016…..
More…
Note…
Enten points out that most of polling from all sources point to about a 30 Democratic House gain in seats…They only 24 to retake the majority form the Republicans….