New York Times political analyst Nate Cohn believes the Democrats’ summer bounce in the polls may be over and that voter sentiment has returned to where it was in April “when Republicans held the edge.”
Cohn pointed to a graph of average weekly search interest from Google Trends that shows a dramatic spike in searches for “abortion” that peaked on June 24, the date the Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade. By late July, the post-Roe bounce had nearly dissipated but remained slightly above pre-decision levels.
By late August, the line representing searches for the “economy” overtook abortion for the first time since the Roe decision and continued to rise steadily. As the abortion line returns to pre-decision levels, the gap between the lines has grown modestly.
Cohn argued Democrats were riding high this summer thanks to not only the increased interest in abortion but falling gas prices and several Democratic legislative wins as well. Additionally, the prime-time Jan. 6 hearings and the FBI’s raid on Mar-a-Lago in August returned attention to former President Donald Trump, who remains rather unpopular among independents. These developments combined to dilute the enthusiastic generic congressional polls we’d seen in the spring.
But Democrats’ luck didn’t last long.
“As those galvanizing factors fall into the rearview mirror, the electorate’s gaze appears to be drifting back toward the earlier set of issues,” Cohn wrote. Citing recent unfavorable inflation news, new interest rate hikes, and a plummeting stock market, he conceded, this “might be more than a return to the politics of April: It may represent a meaningful shift in the national political environment.”
Sounding a bit like he’s apologizing to his readers for having to deliver some very bad news, Cohn launches into a series of equivocal remarks. For example, he tells readers that, except for Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), who has recently moved ahead of his Democratic challenger, there aren’t many signs that the shifting winds have begun to reshape the race for the Senate.
But that’s not true. Senate polls have tightened in the weeks since Labor Day. And the changes favor the GOP.
RealClearPolitics recently moved the race for the open Senate seat in Ohio from the “toss-up” column to “leans Republican.” Nevada Senate candidate Adam Laxalt (R) has taken the lead over incumbent Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D). Democrat John Fetterman’s standing in Pennsylvania has dropped from 6.8% to 4.4% in the past several weeks, though he still leads Republican rival Dr. Mehmet Oz. The gap between Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) and his Republican opponent, Blake Masters, has tightened by several points as well.
And although both Democrats and Republicans are watching these polls closely, there’s an obvious question that must be asked: Can we really rely on these findings as an accurate read of voters’ positions? The answer after the 2016 and 2020 elections, in which pollsters disastrously underestimated Republican performance, is no. Even Cohn admitted in a previous article that many of the districts where Democrats are forecast to perform well this November are the same ones that overestimated Democrats’ odds before.
And yet they seem to be making the exact same mistake again. Citing an ABC-Washington Post poll that showed Republicans leading by 5% among likely voters, Cohn argued the finding “may prove to be an outlier.” He also failed to mention the biggest takeaway from the poll: In competitive congressional districts, Republicans led Democrats by a margin of 55% to 34% among all voters.
The enthusiasm gap between Democrats and Republicans is also an indication that the GOP has more of an advantage than pollsters are willing to admit. CBS found that “Republicans were five points likelier than Democrats to say they would ‘definitely’ vote, 79% to 74%.” Similarly, ABC-Washington Post found 81% of Republicans “absolutely certain” to vote, compared with 75% of Democrats.
All of this is good news for the GOP, which is probably why so few mainstream analysts are talking about it. We’ve been through this before — twice now. And the public will no doubt be watching to see whether the polling industry discredits itself once again. As Ian Fleming put it, once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, and the third time, it’s enemy action.
Elizabeth Stauffer is a contributor to the Washington Examiner and the Western Journal. Her articles have appeared on many websites, including MSN, RedState, Newsmax, the Federalist, and RealClearPolitics. Follow her on Twitter or LinkedIn.
