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Whoops: Chuck Schumer Accidentally Blows Up the Narrative About Dems' Midterm Chances

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Democrats have been trying to push a new narrative about the midterms over the past couple of weeks. That narrative claims that the polls are moving toward them winning the House. That narrative also claims that Joe Biden is “Dark Brandon” and his “successes” are helping bring the polls back for the Democrats. But that’s not supported by the reality of the polls, as we’ve pointed out. Even the NY Times said that the Democrats are overestimating where they are.

But in what has to be a truly hilarious moment, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer accidentally revealed the truth and that he doesn’t believe the very Democratic narrative they’re pushing.

He was at an Italian restaurant in Washington, D.C. — Trattoria Alberto — with six other Democratic senators including Chris Coons of Delaware, Mark Kelly of Arizona, Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, Tom Carper of Delaware, John Hickenlooper of Colorado, and Dick Durbin of Illinois. Now you would think they would have enough sense to know that such a group might get a lot of attention and that they should be careful in what they say. But apparently, not so much. What they were saying was loud and it was overheard by other people in the restaurant.

Schumer declared that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is “in trouble” and Democrats were likely going to lose the House — that they only had a 40 percent chance of holding onto it.

Schumer also made some other comments that aren’t going to go over well with his colleagues.

→ The Senate majority leader said House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy “sucks up” to former President Donald Trump.
→ Schumer also said he believed Trump would run for election in 2024.
→ Schumer said Democrats won’t be able to win the Senate race in Iowa. Democrat Mike Franken, a former Navy vice admiral, is running against longtime GOP Sen. Chuck Grassley.
→ With Kelly at the table, Schumer said the Arizona Senate race would tighten if tech billionaire Peter Thiel started spending money to boost Republican Blake Masters.
→ On the legislative front, Schumer said Sen. Joe Manchin’s (D-W.Va.) claim that taxing the rich is akin to “inflation” for wealthy Americans is “ridiculous.”
→ Schumer criticized former New York Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo over redistricting, blaming Cuomo for Democrats failure to pick up House seats during redistricting.

Schumer also played down their possibilities of winning the Senate, saying they only had a 60 percent chance of holding onto it. That’s likely an overestimate, although the race is likely to be tighter in the Senate than in the House. But as we noted, it keeps looking better and better for the Republicans, with the momentum seeming to be in their favor.

Now one has to think that Schumer is seeing some internal polling that isn’t looking good for the Democrats. But frankly, internal or external it’s not looking good for them. But it’s especially telling when even Schumer can’t buy into the lie when he’s having honest conversations with other Democrats.

The New York Times Is Warning Democrats Recent Polling May Be Too Good to Be True

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There have been many critiques of polling errors in recent years, especially after the 2016 presidential election. However, polling has always tended to skew toward the Democrats, and the results in several races in the last decade have been very surprising for some politicos.

If you pay attention to the polling right now, however, there are some signs that the same errors that have overinflated Democrats’ confidence in the past might be doing so again.

Polling analyst Nate Cohn at the New York Times has a piece out this morning that throws a bit of cold water on Democrats’ expectations for keeping the Senate.

Ahead of the last presidential election, we created a website tracking the latest polls — internally, we called it a “polling diary.” Despite a tough polling cycle, one feature proved to be particularly helpful: a table showing what would happen if the 2020 polls were as “wrong” as they were in 2016, when pollsters systematically underestimated Donald J. Trump’s strength against Hillary Clinton.

[…]

We created this poll error table for a reason: Early in the 2020 cycle, we noticed that Joe Biden seemed to be outperforming Mrs. Clinton in the same places where the polls overestimated her four years earlier. That pattern didn’t necessarily mean the polls would be wrong — it could have just reflected Mr. Biden’s promised strength among white working-class voters, for instance — but it was a warning sign.

That warning sign is flashing again: Democratic Senate candidates are outrunning expectations in the same places where the polls overestimated Mr. Biden in 2020 and Mrs. Clinton in 2016.

Cohn points out that Wisconsin currently looks like it’s very in play for Democrats, where incumbent Senator Ron Johnson is in trouble according to the polls. However, he then explains that Wisconsin was “ground zero” for polling error in 2020. Polls during the presidential election cycle overestimated Biden’s strength by 8 percentage points.

“It raises the possibility that the apparent Democratic strength in Wisconsin and elsewhere is a mirage,” Cohn explains. “An artifact of persistent and unaddressed biases in survey research.”

So that makes the lay of the land very different for the Senate elections. Polling in Georgia is solidifying for Herschel Walker over Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock. What’s more, Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada is at risk of losing to Republican challenger Adam Laxalt.

Arizona, a traditionally red state nonetheless, sees Sen. Mark Kelly battling for his career against Blake Masters. While Kelly is polling higher in Arizona right now, Cohn’s data shows Arizona overstated Biden’s support in the state in 2020. As did Pennsylvania, where Mehmet Oz and John Fetterman are fighting over an open seat.

Even if Pennsylvania falls to the Democrats, winning any two of the other seats means GOP control of the Senate. If Cohn’s analysis is correct, you could see the GOP win all three.

Polling continues to show Oz down.
AP Photo/Mary Altaffer

But why does this continue to happen?

If the polls are wrong yet again, it will not be hard to explain. Most pollsters haven’t made significant methodological changes since the last election. The major polling community post-mortem declared that it was “impossible” to definitively ascertain what went wrong in the 2020 election.

The pattern of Democratic strength isn’t the only sign that the polls might still be off in similar ways. Since the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision on abortion, some pollsters have said they’re seeing the familiar signs of nonresponse bias — when people who don’t respond to a poll are meaningfully different from those who participate — creeping back into their surveys.

Brian Stryker, a partner at Impact Research (Mr. Biden is a client), told me that his polling firm was getting “a ton of Democratic responses” in recent surveys, especially in “the familiar places” where the polls have erred in recent cycles.

It’s not a guarantee that the polling is as wrong as it was in the past, but the signs are there. That’s a heavy dose of cold water on Democrats that believe they are seeing a polling surge in the wake of the Dobbs decision and legislative victories for their party. But, as Cohn says, it could very well be a mirage.

Nevada poll on gun control doesn't match reality

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Polls are often useful to get an idea of how the public feels about certain things. They shouldn’t dictate policy in and of themselves–rights are rights no matter how the mob feels about them, after all–but they can still serve a purpose.

However, it should also be noted that polls can swing wildly.

For example, let’s take a recent poll in Nevada.

Nevadans are roughly split on whether stricter gun laws would reduce mass shootings, but vast majorities support gun control policies such as universal background checks and raising the legal age for purchasing assault and semi-automatic weapons to 21, according to the new Nevada Independent/OH Predictive Insights poll.

The poll — which surveyed 924 registered voters between July 9 and July 18, with a 3.2 percent margin of error — showed that 49 percent believe tougher gun laws would reduce the number of mass shootings. Forty-two percent disagreed, and another 10 percent were unsure.

…

However, when asked about certain specific gun restriction policies, Nevadans were much more supportive. For example, 83 percent said they support policies to require criminal background checks for all gun purchases, including those at gun shows and private sales. Federal law only requires a background check whenever a person attempts to buy a gun from a licensed gun dealer, but some states, including Nevada, have implemented broader state background check laws.

They’re saying 83 percent back universal background checks.

Yet when the question came up before voters in the state back in 2017, it passed with just 50.45 percent support.

So, basically, this poll is trying to tell us that 33 percent of the public has now decided to support universal background checks. And we’re expected to believe it?

“But Uvalde! Buffalo! Highland Park!”

Yeah, all of those things happened. Sure.

Yet 2017 was the same year as the Las Vegas shooting. Not only was it more deadly than all three of those shootings combined, but it was also far more local. If anything should have created more than 80+ percent support for a gun control law, that should have done it.

Further, I can’t help but wonder how 42 percent of people can think that more gun laws wouldn’t necessarily reduce shootings yet still support universal background checks.

Then again, that just fits in with something Cam noted on Monday where Republicans were trusted on crime, but that didn’t mesh with the poll’s findings saying that they trusted Democrats on gun control. In other words, the polls are suggesting that respondents are talking out of both sides of their mouths.

Which is possible. The American voter isn’t known to be particularly interested in intellectual consistency.

Regardless, neither of these polls really seems to match reality as we’ve seen it in the past, but that’s especially true in this case. A 33 percent swing just doesn’t make much sense when you look at everything in context, especially since it’s clear that these same people really don’t think universal background checks will do anything for mass shootings.

So what gives?

Frankly, the thing you need to take from this is that polls are useful, sure, but they shouldn’t be taken as gospel truth. They can be manipulated or can just make no sense at all when you compare them with reality.

Poll: gun control big for voters, but economy bigger issue

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With the midterm elections coming up, there’s bound to be a lot of look at what issues matter most to voters. After all, those issues are what candidates are going to need to talk about if they want a shot at winning in November.

A recent poll suggests that gun control is an issue of growing importance for many voters.

More Americans are concerned with gun control policies now than they were a few months ago, according to a new survey conducted from July 28 to Aug. 1 by Monmouth University.

Results of the survey, “Dems Gain Slightly in Congress Support,” indicate that 38% of U.S. voters believe gun control is an “extremely important” issue, up from 32% in May. The polling comes roughly three months out from the Nov. 8 midterm elections. Abortion and gun control are the second and third most important issues among those surveyed.

But according to Patrick Murray, director of the independent Monmouth University Polling Institute, “the state of the economy is certainly going to be omnipresent in the election.” He went on to say that “Democrats may have a harder time motivating their base in part because of the wider range of priorities among their voters.”

In other words, “It’s the economy, stupid,” is still probably a winning strategy for Republicans.

But as for those gun control numbers, let’s look a little deeper.

First, the increase since May isn’t unsurprising. What happened since that previous poll? Uvalde.

Following a mass shooting, people have a tendency to favor gun control. They even tend to favor it enough to call it “extremely important.” So seeing an increase of just six percent isn’t surprising.

However, the interesting thing for me is how the poll categorized things.

You see, that percentage doesn’t necessarily mean just those favoring gun control. Those who see opposition to gun control as important may well have answered similarly, thus driving up that percentage.

Even if that wasn’t the case, though, the poll also found that gun control was the most important issue for just 17 percent of the respondents. Now, that’s much higher than it was in May, but it’s still less than one in five voters.

By contrast, 24 percent said the economy was the biggest issue for them, and that’s not a win for the Biden administration no matter how you cut it.

The truth of the matter is that gun control may tend to poll well, but we’ve seen time and time again that while gun rights drive a lot of right-leaning voters, gun control doesn’t have the same kind of draw among Democrats.

As a result, there’s more pressure on Republicans to preserve gun rights than there is on Democrats to push for gun control.

In that regard, absolutely nothing has changed in recent years besides there being a more pressing need among gun rights voters. After all, if the Senate is truly lost, we’re going to have a long, dark period as it’s a certainty that Democrats will pass their gun bans.

Luckily, the numbers don’t suggest that’s likely.