On this week’s Strength In Numbers podcast, Elliott and David dig into why the Wisconsin governor’s primary polls overestimated Francesca Hong by 20 points, why the “the polls are overestimating the left” narrative falls apart pretty quickly (look at Minnesota), and why late primaries are bad for democracy (and frustrating for election forecasters).
Here are the big takeaways:
Hong’s miss is a 90th-percentile polling miss, not proof the industry is broken. The pre-election average had her up about 20 on David Crowley, and she lost by one. In the Senate and governor primaries Elliott and Mary Radcliffe analyzed going back a decade, the average poll misses the margin between the top two by 13 points, and misses of 20-plus happen about 10% of the time. What’s genuinely unusual is the direction: in all eight of the 20-point misses in the database, the polls underestimated the leader — Tammy Duckworth by 20 in the 2016 Illinois Senate primary, Sam Brown in Nevada in 2024 — and the previous record for overestimating an eventual loser was 19 points, in the 2024 Puerto Rico governor’s race. (Lamar Alexander in 2014 and Spencer Cox were both overestimated by 15-plus and won anyway.) Evergreen reminder: polling primaries is hard.
We should judge candidates by their absolute performance, not performance relative to the polls. If nobody had polled Wisconsin, the only available take Tuesday night would have been “wow, that was close.” Instead, polls set up a prior for everyone that Hong would win big — so when she didn’t, the election gets cast as a “disappointment for the left.” David argues for rooting our grading of candidates by their actual performance. Elliott says you could also use the fundamentals. But be consistent: you can throw out the polls as junk and trash them when they’re wrong, but then you can’t say candidates “underperformed” based on polls.
At a D+7 national environment, Wisconsin and Minnesota are at worst lean D, and maybe likely. With a generic ballot running D+7 to D+8, Minnesota a couple points bluer than the country and Wisconsin about a point redder, a win by under five points for either Democratic candidate would be a surprise. Especially considering in Wisconsin the Republican nominee for governor, Tom Tiffany, is a Freedom Caucus member, election denier who voted against recognizing Biden’s win days after January 6, one of only 18 House members to oppose the resolution condemning QAnon, and very far right on abortion. Democrats will spend heavily making all of that central to their campaign — while Trump has, at best, a 40-42% approval rating in the state. Maybe this is bluer than people think?
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