It just seems to keep on happening — Democrats get their hopes up from rosy-looking polls, but they get a rude awakening when votes are tallied on election night.
In 2016, Trump’s win shocked the world. In 2020, a seeming Democratic romp turned into a nail-biter. And now, as the 2022 midterms are drawing nearer, polls show Democrats performing surprisingly decently — pointing toward a close election rather than the long-expected GOP wave.
Unless, of course, the polls are just underestimating Republicans again.
And lately, there’s been a debate among election analysts, including the New York Times’s Nate Cohn and FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver, about whether that’s exactly what we should expect this time.
It has always been a good idea to treat polls, poll averages, and election forecasts with some healthy skepticism. They’re all good at getting us in the neighborhood of the outcome, most of the time. But in any given cycle polls are frequently off by a few points on average, and they can miss by much more in individual races while being on target in others.
