Should We Believe Polls or Special Election Results?

Earlier this week, Democrats had above-average showings in a number of states with partisan races on the ballot.  This was true in red states and blue states alike, with Democrats taking over the Virginia state House, holding both houses of the New Jersey legislature, winning the Kentucky gubernatorial race, and even in defeat, putting up their best showing in Mississippi since the 1990s.  This is the latest in a string of victories for the Democrats, who outperformed expectations in the 2022 midterms and have prevailed in the vast majority of special elections since then.  The results are in stark contrast to months' worth of worsening Presidential poll numbers heading into 2024.  Does it come down to as binary of a schism of "a Democratic Party problem versus a Biden problem"?  Or is there more going on here?

First of all, I should refrain from optimism in my electoral predictions as every time I deviate from my inherently skeptical nature, I get burned.  Back in June, the stars were lining up for Biden and I suggested he could be on track for a convincing re-election victory if the fundamentals continued improving.  Since then, even with above-average fundamentals, Biden's numbers have only gotten worse, and the unrest in the Middle East has only further complicated his efforts to rebuild his barely sufficient 2020 coalition.  But based on how well Democrats have been doing in the last two years, is it reasonable to speculate that the polls aren't capturing the size of Biden's pending coalition?

It may be.  Ever since the Dobbs decision, Democrats have exploited the abortion issue to impressive electoral effect, turning contest after contest into a referendum on legal abortion.  There's no reason to doubt that Democrats will run that same playbook as much as is possible in 2024, and they'll almost certainly win some votes that Biden wouldn't have otherwise won because of it. 

Even setting abortion aside, there's some indication that the polling models have overcorrected from their problems in 2016 and 2020, and may now be oversampling Republicans instead of Democrats.  The most prominent, but far from the only, example is Wisconsin.  After two cycles of horrendous polling in the Badger State that badly underestimated Trump support, the opposite happened in 2022 with Democratic Governor Tony Evers outperforming the polls and Republican Senator Ron Johnson barely squeaking by despite polls showing him winning by a more decisive margin.  Even this week in Kentucky and Mississippi, which are also hard states to poll and frequently undersample conservatives, the Democratic gubernatorial candidates outperformed the most recent polls.

But all of these recent contests where Democrats have done better than expected have one thing in common.....Donald Trump was not on the ballot.  Despite the long-held conventional wisdom of how much of an anchor Trump is on the Republican Party, every available example has shown us the opposite result.  Trump blew up the polling models in 2016, finding votes nobody expected in key states that got him 306 electoral votes.  Assurances that he could never build upon that voter base fell flat four years later when he found an astonishing 10 million more votes than he did in 2016, falling just short of a second term only because the Democrats crushed turnout records to an even more unprecedented level.

There's no reason to believe Trump isn't capable of bringing out this stealth voter base once again in 2024, provided that he's the nominee.  He has an unmatched ability to bring out low-propensity populist voters that nobody else has proven capable of getting to the polls, particularly now that the MAGA revolution is realigning the electorate along educational lines and bringing increasing numbers of noncollege voters of color into the GOP orbit.  With that in mind, I'd be more comfortable with the notion of continued Democratic turnout overperformance if Nikki Haley or Ron DeSantis was the Republican nominee, as that would likely come with a more predictable electorate.  An election where Donald Trump is on the ballot is simply harder to know what the electorate will look like.  

And despite the consensus opinion that Trump is the weakest possible nominee for the Republicans, I submit that more votes would be cast for Trump than any other Republican in the field.  The wild card, of course, is that Trump would likely bring out more voters to cast ballots against him than any other candidate in the field as well.  That puts Trump in the odd position of simultaneously being the GOP's best possible 2024 nominee and its worst, probably rendering BOTH the polls and the Democrats' election victories since 2020 as irrelevant metrics heading into next November.