Harry Enten, formerly with poll maven site FiveThirtyEight and now with CNN, talks not about polls – but about the behavior of pollsters and what that may augur:
Polls of the week: Four internal House polls released this week by groups aligned with Democratic or liberal causes. Conservative and Republican groups released no internal House polls this week. This is part of a pattern seen this year with left-wing groups putting out 93% of the partisan polls collected by FiveThirtyEight compared to only 7% by right-wing groups.
What’s the big idea: The House of Representatives is difficult to predict because non-partisan polling for individual districts is limited and often not that accurate. Much of the polling released is done by partisan groups.
The obvious problem with partisan-sponsored polls is that it tends to only see the light of day when it looks good for the side who is conducting the poll.
But, of course, a group first needs to get a poll with good results for their side to actually release it. This got me thinking that if one side fields a lot of polls that end up favorable to their side, then maybe they’re more likely to release more internal polls than other side.
It turns out that this has been true in past years.
Ah, so we have what may be a “tell,” to use poker-gab. You only talk when the news is good.
In every year but one, left-wing groups have put out more internal polls relative to right-wing groups. Still, there is a clear relationship between how many internal polls each side is releasing and the election results. The more internal polls put out by left-wing groups relative to right-wing groups, the better Democrats tend to do in House elections. …
But count the share of internal polls left-wing groups have put out relative to Republicans as another good sign for Democrats in 2018. Democrats have done very well in special elections,continue to lead on the generic congressional ballot and Republicans have a lot more seats at risk, according to ratings from CNN and others. All of these factors, at this juncture, point to Democrats doing very well in November’s House elections.
This is the sort of observation which can be invaluable, and it’s one of those details that comes from experts, not us dumb clods in the streets. It’ll be interesting to see if Harry’s observation turns out to be right.
