Midterms notepad | #204 – August 7, 2022

Kansas, cross-pressured voters, and the changing* political environment

Happy Sunday everyone,

I am deep in work projects this week and organizing a lot of promotion for Strength in Numbers, which launches in the UK and Europe this coming Friday. That means I have only managed to find an hour to write a newsletter on the state of the midterms today. This post is therefore brief, but nevertheless important. I have been asked a few common questions about the race from various reporters, pundits and prognosticators that are worth answering here now for a broader audience.

Start with the national polling. Democrats have now taken a bare lead in FiveThirtyEight’s average of generic ballot polls, up from -3 on this day in June, before the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision that revoked the federal right to an abortion (though attach the usual caveats about the uncertainty around the average):

This is a big deal. While the entirety of the movement in the aggregate may not be real, at least some of it definitely is. We know the movement is not only due to sampling error…