As politicians from both sides of the aisle brace for the final sprint before the midterm elections, a former GOP White House official said he believes polling is skewed toward Democrats, giving analysts a warped view of the electoral landscape.
Ari Fleischer, the former White House press secretary for the Bush administration, is cautioning that a bulk of the midterm polls being eyed by analysts lean too heavily on registered voters instead of likely ones, thereby including troves of those who are unlikely to cast their vote.
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var _bp = _bp||[]; _bp.push({ "div": "Brid_64315131", "obj": {"id":"27789","width":"16","height":"9","video":"1106734"} }); ","_id":"00000183-8433-d13a-a9ff-fd3fe7140000","_type":"2f5a8339-a89a-3738-9cd2-3ddf0c8da574"}”>Video Embed”Registered voters don’t vote. Voters vote. And so you need to switch to likely voters. Likely voters always vote more Republican than registered voters. And right now, the media is still using an overbroad pool of people called registered voters,” Fleischer told Fox News’s Laura Ingraham.
Republicans began the summer as the favorite to surf a red wave and win the midterm elections against the backdrop of Democrats being dogged by historical trends, unbridled inflation, soaring gas prices, lackluster approval ratings for President Joe Biden, and an uptick in crime.
But in the time since, the GOP has seemingly weathered electoral blowback from the overturn of Roe v. Wade in June, while Democrats have been buoyed by easing inflation, a downtick in gas prices, a string of legislative achievements, and rebounding poll numbers for Biden.
A trove of polls showed Democrats eating away at the GOP’s advantage, trimming projections for their gains in the House, and making them the favorite to win in the nail-biter battle for the Senate in multiple forecasts, such as the one from FiveThirtyEight.
However, Fleischer contends that underlying polling, like the ones used in many of those forecasts, also don’t focus enough on battleground districts that will determine the balance of power in Washington, D.C.
“It’s just an amazingly distorted way to present news to people who want to know what’s the shape of November looking like. It doesn’t matter what happens in the cities. It doesn’t matter what happens in some of the more rural districts,” Fleischer continued. “It matters in those battleground districts. That’s where control of the House is at stake.”
Fleischer is not alone in his concerns about polling. New York Times elections analyst Nate Cohn recently wrote a piece warning that there were similar patterns in this midterm spate of polling to prior cycles in which pollsters overestimated Democrats’ prospects.
Over recent weeks, Republicans have seen some promising polling out of Georgia, Wisconsin, and elsewhere that have given them a glimmer of renewed hope that they are still in the running to capture the 50-50 Senate.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has described the race for the Senate as a “jump ball” while reportedly voicing more optimism in private. The midterm elections are about six weeks out.
