whiterock said:
Current RCP Senate projection is GOP +2
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2022/senate/elections-map-rcp-projection.html
RCP is more accurate than 538
Momentum is all GOP, so surprises are more likely to raise the GOP number than the Dem number.
This article (published here in part) in Politico is about the trouble with polling. Main point is pollsters having trouble getting the composition of the electorate. It's long, but a fun read for a few.
Pollsters fear they're blowing it again in 2022Democrats seem to be doing better than expected with voters. But if the polls are wrong, they could be disappointed in November again.
Pollsters know they have a problem. But they aren't sure they've fixed it in time for the November election.Since Donald Trump's unexpected 2016 victory, pre-election polls have consistently understated support for Republican candidates, compared to the votes ultimately cast.Once again, polls over the past two months are showing Democrats running stronger than once expected in a number of critical midterm races.
It's left some wondering whether the rosy results are setting the stage for another potential polling failure that dashes Democratic hopes of retaining control of Congress and vindicates the GOP's assertion that the polls are unfairly biased against them.It's not that pollsters haven't tried to fix the issues that plagued them in recent elections. Whether they're public firms conducting surveys for the media and academic instructions or private campaign consultants, they have spent the past two years tweaking their methods to avoid a 2020 repeat.
But most of the changes they have made are small. Some pollsters are hoping that since Trump isn't running in the midterms, the problems of underestimating Republicans' vote share will disappear with him. But others worry that Trump's ongoing dominance of the news cycle from the FBI seizure of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago to litigation against his businesses in New York effectively is making him the central political figure going into Election Day.
"There's no question that the polling errors in [20]16 and [20]20 worry the polling profession, worry me as a pollster," said Charles Franklin, the director of the Marquette Law School Poll in Milwaukee and a longtime survey-taker in the battleground state of Wisconsin. "The troubling part is how much of that is unique to when Donald Trump is on the ballot, versus midterms when he is not on the ballot."
After 2016,
pollsters said the problem was their samples included too few voters without college degrees. The polls were better for the 2018 midterms, though they were still too Democratic on balance.
Then came 2020 which was worse than 2016, and for which pollsters have yet to settle on
a definitive explanation of what precisely went wrong. As a result,
an easy fix has proven elusive.
But pollsters have mostly agreed that, particularly in 2020, the surveys missed a chunk of Trump's voters who refused to participate in polls. The current 2022 polling is wildly favorable for Democrats.
FiveThirtyEight's "lite" prediction model, which is based solely on the latest polling data
, says Democrats have a 79 percent chance to retain control of the Senate. That probability clashes with the expectations of both parties and most independent handicappers, who consider the battle for the chamber to be closer to a coin flip. https://www.politico.com/news/2022/09/26/pollsters-fear-elections-2024-00058506?nname=playbook&nid=0000014f-1646-d88f-a1cf-5f46b7bd0000&nrid=0000014f-091f-dc50-a77f-2fff8e170000&nlid=630318
