From this to the Selzer poll to special elections, all of the big indicators that succeeded at clocking Trump’s strength in 2016 and 2020 went totally bust this year. Nate Cohn was absolutely right; turnout dynamics have changed too much to use them as a baseline as I did.
https://twitter.com/obummer7/status/1854160310451437702
The likely cause of this appears to be Dobbs causing Dems to solidify their strength with high-prop, high-engagement voters in a way that prevented those groups from depicting shifts in attitudes as they did in the past.
This isn’t a new insight at all, ofc—Cohn proved that this was definitively the case with special elections way back earlier this year. I had hope that WA’s higher turnout could allow it to still be useful, but neither it nor the state at large was predictive of national shifts.
It all leaves us flying pretty blind going forward. Maybe these indicators could prove useful again in midterms with low turnout, but even the tools that beat the polls in 2020 are clearly not applicable to presidential cycles now.
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