If you can look past the media noise, Biden's disapproval has slowly narrowed of late on 538, from 4.5 points underwater at its worst to 2.3 points as of today (9/21).
Will be interesting to see how this progresses.
Polls are a snapshot in time.
He'll probably bump back into the green at some point IMO. The historical levels of polarization we have today makes his floor significantly higher than people might expect. As campaigning kicks off for 2022, it might stabilize a bit more.
The bigger question here is whether a change like this is evidence of any meaningful, sustained movement back or whether it's just randomness bouncing it around. Good cases for either, but whatever the answer, it'll probably be drowned out by what happens with infra/debt ceiling.
(suffice to say that if Glenn Youngkin wants an actual, real chance at the Virginia governor's mansion, the best hope for him probably lies in an October shutdown and debt-ceiling crisis that is pinned by voters on Biden and Democrats)
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(1) the reported results are among *adults*, not RVs (2) Poll doesn't weight by education, vax rate, party, or region. (3) Adult sample is only Biden +7 (4) "Do you consider yourself a white (Hispanic/Latino) or a black (Hispanic/Latino)?" is a question?
There's very few universes in which a 55% college-educated electorate votes for Glenn Youngkin by 5 points in 2021.
It's also a bit of a stretch for me to think that in a state that was Biden +10, the *likely voter electorate* is Biden +1.
I think what's happened here is fairly simple: this agency does not appear to have the slightest idea as to what they're doing (they're not even listed on 538 as a pollster from what I can find?)
The Canadian election is probably a bit more important, but for those curious, @Thorongil16 and I have an update to our #VAGov model with the Washington Post D+3 poll from Friday.
Our forecast is Democrats winning by 7.3, with an 80% chance of victory.
@Thorongil16 This race has stayed remarkably stable, with few real swings in polling. Even the WaPo D+3 poll was really because of an incredibly R-friendly LV screen that appears to have oversampled non-college whites via a new polling technique. The poll of registered voters was D+6.
There is little in my mind that suggests that this race has substantially changed in the last month. If Biden's approval plunges to around ~42% on FiveThirtyEight or something, we could be in for a very real race. But until then, this race remains likely Democratic.
It won't matter as much as the generic national political environment will in 2022, but if the GOP reliance on election day votes doesn't let up a little, it's not hard to imagine it being a little costly in some areas where the weather isn't all that great on November 8, 2022.
These types of things are *significantly* less important than the overall national political environment. But let's say a storm hits in an area where a key seat is up for grabs. What then? Not everyone who would have voted will. Rita Hart lost by 6 votes in 2020.
Overall, it's just hard to escape the thought that the GOP have likely cost themselves some close seats somewhere thanks to the lies about mail ballots that they've been pushing among their base. It's just that the ones they do cost will depend on the national environment.
This is also one of the more conservative estimates of the college-educated electorate share -- McAuliffe wins college voters by 22 points (similar to what Biden did) but WaPo's LV screen says the share of college voters *drops* by a few points from 2020. Bit skeptical of that.
If anything, I'd have thought the enthusiasm gap would have been shown more in intra-group turnout differential (e.g. college Rs are more likely to turn out than college Dems), but that's not happening in this poll at all!! It's basically a weird electorate screen.
McAuliffe is winning college voters by a greater margin than Biden did. So it's a bit strange to see, then, that the delta between non-college and college voters is *higher* than it was in 2020, and it cuts counter to most of what we already know re: turnout, hence my skepticism.
We've updated our 2021 #VAGov model with the recent Emerson poll. The projection now has McAuliffe (D) winning by 7.5 points, with an 80% chance of victory in November.
I do expect this to actually move as more polling comes in, but we're currently not seeing many polls, and so due to recency being factored into the model, a newer poll in a polling drought will have a bit more of an effect than you might expect. (someone please poll this race!)
As a reminder, polls are broken into three parts: topline (50%), electorate screen (25%), and crosstabs (25%). We combine this with 2020 margins and education-based turnout fundamentals (calculated via legislative district turnout regressions) to get our projection.
I wrote about midterm electorates, their changes from presidential years, and the partisan implications today in the Crystal Ball. Educated voters seem to turn out more while minorities turn out less, and that makes 2022 fascinatingly complicated.
In states like New Hampshire or Wisconsin, it is plausible that your electorate might be more Biden supporting than it was a year ago, at least in terms of 2020 vote cast, because of how white they are…
But that doesn’t mean Democrats would actually do better, though, because voters could be persuaded to vote R (shown by Biden’s currently low approval ratings) — the picture for a good Democratic 2020 in those states that largely relies upon keeping those suburban gains intact