FiveThirtyEight outs a secret about American political reporting these days….
Less than two weeks out from the 2022 Midterm elections…
The number of polls that media and pundits rely on have dropped…..
Worst….
The poll’s that are used to get a view of things are MORE from party leaning outfits….
And ?
For some races?
There are no polls at all….
Of course we’re actually in a recession so the moeny for extensive polling is drying up…..
Soooo?
On November 8th?
Do NOT be surprised if the lay of the political land does NOT come down as expected…..
Fewer polls from a smaller number of pollsters
Simply put, there have been way fewer polls in 2022 than in past cycles. In 2010, pollsters conducted almost 1,700 polls of individual races for Senate, House and governor between early May and late October. By comparison, we have slightly more than half that number this time around — about 900……
….
Though the overall number of individual races polled has decreased, the number of polls of Senate, House and governors races has varied over these 12 years. This year, we have around 350 polls for both Senate and gubernatorial contests. Compared with 2018, that’s slightly fewer polls of Senate races and slightly more polls of governors races. Still, this is far less than the 500-plus surveys we had of both of those types of races in 2010 and 2014. Meanwhile, the number of House polls has ebbed and flowed since 2010: We only have about 200 House polls over the past six months, almost identical to 2014’s total, whereas we had more than 400 House polls in 2018 and more than 500 in 2010.
Interestingly, as the number of surveys of races at the state or district level has fallen, the number of national polls that ask about the generic ballot — which asks respondents which party they plan to support in their local U.S. House election — has more than doubled in 2022. This could be down to a couple of factors: For one thing, politics today are more nationalized than in the past, so pollsters may be incentivized to conduct national surveys, which will get more clicks and views. And it’s also potentially more economical — and safer — to poll a national audience on different issues and the generic ballot — which, for instance, can produce multiple stories for a media organization — than to poll individual races at the state level. The former involves weighting polls by information about the national population, whereas state-level polls may require more difficult choices to properly interpret results, as we’ve consistently seen larger errors in certain states than at the national level….
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Partisan sources are releasing a larger share of polls
That’s because, compared with past cycles, polls in 2022 are more likely to be sponsored or associated with partisan sources. This is a problem because partisan polls tend to be more inaccurate than polls conducted by or for nonpartisan groups. Internal polls, which are sponsored by candidates’ campaigns, often try to spin a certain narrative by showing their preferred candidate in a better position than what polls from nonpartisan sources are indicating.
On FiveThirtyEight’s polls page, we denote whether a poll is sponsored by an organization that is considered partisan or is sponsored by a campaign.2 When we looked at the share of partisan polls in 2022 and for previous midterms, we found that the percentage of polls in Senate, House and gubernatorial contests coming from partisan sources has reached new heights….
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The state of polling is disconcerting. We have fewer polls, and a larger share of them come from partisan sources. We also have less information about House races, making race-to-race forecasting more perilous. All of this is a challenge for what we do at FiveThirtyEight, and we hope that pollsters and news organizations figure out how to offer the public greater polling information in the future….