Republicans are understandably distraught when they hear the mainstream media endlessly repeating the mantra that there will be a historic “blue wave” in the November midterm elections. President Trump's allegedly incompetent and borderline-tyrannical misrule of the rightfully indignant American people will produce a suitable backlash, we are told: Democrats will surely take the House, and possibly the Senate. Will the Republican Party even survive this shellacking? The verdict is out.
This narrative is supported by polling conducted on behalf of major news organizations. CNN's latest poll, conducted Oct. 4-Oct. 7, is a good case in point. It claims that, in the “generic ballot” question that asks whether likely voters are inclined to support the Democratic or Republican candidate for the House of Representatives in their local district, Democrats hold a massive 13-point edge: 54 to 41 percent. Wow! Truly, the race is over, if this poll is to be believed, and Republicans are the losers par excellence. Or is it that simple?
When one drills down to the particulars in the CNN survey, one finds myriad reasons to doubt its accuracy. For one thing, it forecasts a “gender gap” of unprecedented proportions: it finds that 63 percent of female likely voters will back the Democrats, compared to only 45 percent of men. Although it is normal for women to be more supportive of Democratic candidates than men, the size of the discrepancy seldom exceeds 10 points. This is suspicious.
Even more damning to the reliability of the poll is its prediction that voters over 65 will favor Democrats by 18 points. This is in the realms of pure fantasy, given that older voters have consistently favored Republicans in recent years, and in 2016 they voted for Republican House candidates over Democrats 53-to-45 percent. A “blue wave” might, in the most optimistic scenario, mean that Democrats would tie Republicans among older voters, but the notion that they could win this demographic in a landslide is an absurdity.
The CNN poll is equally dubious when it comes to race. In 2016, according to exit polls, white voters favored Republican House candidates by 22 points: 60-to-38 percent. But in 2018 CNN predicts Republican House candidates will win the white vote by only 1 point. Nonsense.
There are deeper reasons, however, to mistrust the CNN poll and others like it. Above all, we should consider the history of polling, and how frequently individual polls, and even the average of polls, can be wrong.
It's no secret that in 2016 the polls predicted that Hillary Clinton would be our next Ppresident, and yet here she is in 2018 — a private citizen, albeit an outspoken one. What is more interesting, for our purposes, is that, also in 2016, many polling organizations were asking the usual “generic ballot” question of voters: in their district, would they prefer the Democratic or the Republican candidate for the House of Representatives? Based on the RealClearPolitics average of major polls, at no point in the 2016 election cycle (May to November) did Republicans have a lead on this question, and yet Republicans won the national popular vote for the House by one point and maintained control of the chamber. Let that sink in. Polling averages generally favored the Democrats by 3 to 5 points, they never favored the Republicans, and yet the Democrats still lost. How could this be?
The answer is, in part, that there are, included within these national polling averages, bogus polls like CNN's monstrosity predicting a 13-point win for Democrats. By no means is this the first time that CNN has overrated Democratic strength. In 2006, the last time there truly was a “blue wave,” Democrats won the national popular vote for the House by 8 points. Nonetheless, the last CNN generic ballot poll showed Democrats winning by 20 points. That's a large discrepancy, to say the least.