Chris Hayes: Democrats Overperforming in Elections is "Real" as Opposed to Polling Data

All In with Chris Hayes

A Referendum on the Job Approval of the Biden Administration

"The 2022 midterm elections will be a referendum on the performance of the Biden Administration." 

That's a quote that could be attributed to any of fifty news commentators on virtually any network or news source prior to the big red wave that was coming, to sweep Republicans back in power because people, well, people just weren't all that enthused about the Presidency of Joe Biden.  Generally, if I watch network or cable news, it tends to be MSNBC, so they were saying it less frequently than the Fox news commentators, but there's no mistaking their certainty that even though the President is not on the midterm ballot, his job performance would be.  

By the time the midterm elections rolled around, the composite polling data was measuring his job approval level at 42%. Yes, indeed they were,  And so, coupled with the doom and gloom of the fact that the party in power always loses seats in Congress during a midterm, it was pretty clear that the red tsunami, a term that conservative news was using, was going to shift around 40 or 50 house seats and sweep Mitch McConnell right back into the senate majority leader office.  And in spite of the polls "tightening" right before the election, as they always do, the term "red wave" was still being used right up to the time election results started coming in.  

Oops. 

Both "red wave" and "referendum on the Biden administration's job performance" disappeared from the news narrative that same evening, except on MSNBC, whose commentators continued to refer to the results as a referendum, staggering in its failure to conform to previous midterm election results for the party in power, but a referendum, nonetheless, on what was an outstanding performance of a Presidential administration.  

It was a night of Blue bombshells, among them the sweep, by Democrats, of statewide offices in Arizona, including a dramatic shift to a Democrat in the governor's mansion, the return of a Democrat to Pennsylvania's governor's mansion after a two-term Democrat was term limited, the flipping of Pennsylvania's Republican senate seat and the re-election of Raphael Warnock to Georgia's Senate seat which held the Senate majority for Democrats.

Polls Try to Predict the Results, but Elections are Real Results  

Not long after that, we were back to doom and gloom, a dropping job approval rating, though it has been somewhere between 42% and 48% depending on which pollster you use on whatever day you choose, and more signs that the Biden administration just wasn't cutting it with voters.  As the election draws closer, and decisions were made regarding candidates planning to run, in October, polling data that showed the President with a comfortable lead over his Republican rivals suddenly, and inexplicably, shifted.  

I will note that there has been a shift in the composite polling average which is comprised of a multitude of polls, more now than there were in 2016 or 2020.  Some of them show very little change over the course of a long period of time, while a trend sort of developed after a New York Times/Siena College poll shockingly reported that Trump had taken a small, within the margin of error lead, over the President.  The Times was one of the "red wave" alarmists among the media, right up to within a week of the mid-term elections (late October, according to what they still have archived on their website).  

I always watch MSNBC's election coverage.  They do a much better job of analysis and explaining than any of the other networks do.  Their reassurances were comforting, noting that mountains of mail-in ballots were being counted with a substantial number of Democratic votes in several battleground states and to be patient, wait, and Joe Biden would eventually be known as the winner of the election.  They explained exactly how the count would go in places like Georgia, Pennsylvania, Arizona and Nevada, and were very confident in their predictions.  And they were right. 

So when Chris Hayes did some research into election results, following yet another gloriously successful night of off-year elections that defied the doom and gloom of most media pundits who more than likely knew how things would turn out but weren't willing to concede yet another cluster of referendum elections on the Biden Administration's job performance, he found some interesting facts.  Hayes discovered that not only have Democrats defied prior trends after a sucessful Presidential election, but in this most recent string of special elections and off-year elections, they are overperforming their baseline by 11 percentage points.  That is, according to Hayes and his research, significant.  

So are we looking at a referendum on the Biden administration that goes against the polling data, or should I say, against the conclusions of the pollsters?  As Hayes suggests, polls are theoretical guesses, elections are the real results.  

Why is there Such Incongruity Between Polls and Election Results? 

Presidential campaigns over the past decade or so have gone on a lot longer than in the past.  As soon as one election ends, it seems like campaigning starts for the next, a gift, at least in part, of the 24 hour, round the clock news channels, podcasts and sensational media.  It's too early to gauge public opinion nine months before the major parties have their nominating conventions.  And we know that a lot of "fake polling" has been fed into the composite data, on purpose.  

Methods of gathering data are also suspect.  The Gallup organization, a well-respected and generally accurate, long-term polling group, has said that electronic technology, especially the rapid advance of cell phones, combined with the high number of people, mostly under 40, who no longer even have a land-line telephone, greatly complicates gathering "random"  samples and collecting data, and skewing results.  They have expanded their margins of error, and increased the number of actual responses in collecting data to try and improve their accuracy.  They claim they have resisted adding this to a list of factors considered in analyzing results.  They do a wide variety of research on multiple topics, not just politics, which helps them identify trends over time.  But their explanation may be the best one we have as to why polls and elections are not squaring up as accurately as they once did.  

And as Chris Hayes, and his colleagues who have been involved directly in White House administrations, Nicole Wallace and Jen Psaki suggest, there are other factors to look at when considering the job approval and re-election chances of a sitting President.  That would include the number of individuals committed to supporting him with their cash.  It's hard to argue that there's been a high level of concern among Democrats about the President's age and viability as a candidate when money for his campaign is hitting record highs so early in the campaign, and when the number of individual contributors is reaching levels above where they were prior to the 2020 election.  

People may say they wish someone younger would run, but in reality, their money is telling us what they're going to do when they cast their ballot.  That's happening, while his likely Republican opponent is reduced to raising money by whining about 92 indictments he is facing on serious insurrection, fraud and theft of classified documents charges. 

There are also multiple other options right now.  The nomination process is just beginning.  The Biden campaign won't really get into full action mode until after the beginning of the year, and they are using a sound strategy combining their pointed advertising, much of which is reaching into electronic media, and a ground game to activate voters and get them to the polls.  A couple of the big pollsters have actually admitted that they were off because they significantly underestimated the number of "likely voters" among Democratic party constituencies in 2022, most notably Millennial generation voters. 

So Will These Trends Continue into the 2024 Election?

I can't remember who it was who said it, but I remember, back during the Reagan administration, hearing a pundit or commentator say that "Public opinion shifts just don't happen, they are manufactured."  Do people really shift back and forth between politicians when it comes to politics?  Not really.  We do seem to have a much higher percentage of Americans who are unable to understand how politics and government work, who are unable to distinguish between propaganda and truth, and who fall into a cynical and apathetic malaise of confusion because they let themselves be affected by every trendy fad or conspiracy theory that makes the rounds of social media, than we did thirty years ago.  But we're talking about upwards of 150 million people who are registered and eligible to vote.  The majority of those who will are generally more informed than those who don't live in the real world.  

It's showing up in real election results, not polls.  And there's a lot that will happen between now and the 2024 election.  A legal system that has so far withstood challenges to its integrity is about to deliver some verdicts that will have an effect on how people vote, something that even the right leaning polls now are admitting will be a significant and negative effect on their favorite candidate.  Bottom line, I believe that if the election were held tomorrow, Biden would win the popular vote by at least 8 million votes, would add the states of North Carolina and Ohio to his electoral total while holding every state he won in 2020, and would be re-elected along with a majority Democratic House and Senate.