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Welcome to this week’s edition of the Surge, a politics newsletter that also wasn’t at the Hawks game in February 2024. That’s another misunderstanding: We were hawking game, as we like to make a little cash on the side selling rare meats.
How much politics happened this week? We’ll put it like this: On a scale from 1 to 10, it was a … 5.5 or 6, probably. Both chambers of Congress have departed D.C. through Election Day, which means they have to spend more time with their annoying constituents and their incessant, whiny demands. Hang in there, candidates.
We’ve already made fun of Eric Schmitt in this edition, and we will continue to do so later on, because it’s rare that someone is caught so red-handed being a dope. Plus, we look at Donald Trump’s campaign travel schedule, which is light on places where there are competitive campaigns and heavy on the few pockets of the country where he can rest assured crowds will be nice to him.
But first, the polls. They have reached such a point of goodness for Democrats that we are compelled to ask: Is something fishy going on?
What matters now: Are the polls for Democrats too good to be true?
Last week, we wrote about how the situation was becoming so dire for Republicans that they were hustling to defend states like Iowa, Nebraska, and Kansas. We instantly felt ashamed of ourselves. A core mission of this newsletter is to accelerate debilitating and unproductive anxiety in Democratic readers, not to make them optimistic.
So in this edition, after another week of Democratic candidates showing double-digit leads in generic ballot polling and posting more whopping leads in every battleground across the map, we’re exploring a more on-brand topic: What if the polls are overstating Democrats’ position?
We asked veteran Democratic pollster Celinda Lake if any red flags jumped out at her from the public polls showing Democrats essentially leading every race across the country by 100-point margins. She mentioned two things.
First, that “these polls assume young people are going to turn out at record-high levels,” but that “I haven’t seen enough investment to make sure that’s true.” Young people have moved sharply away from Trump since 2024, which makes sense: The biggest issue in the country is the cost of living, and young people have no money. And young people could turn out at record levels. But expecting young people to turn out at record levels is a famously risky proposition in electoral politics.
Second, she said, was that most of these polls show “depressed Republican turnout,” a problem that Republicans—who have a serious financial advantage over Democrats this cycle—are spending unlimited sums of cash to amend.
In sum: These recent, dramatic numbers are “driven by two things: a blue surge and a red drag,” she said. “And I think both may be overestimated.”
When polling has underestimated Republican energy in the Trump era, there’s a common cause: Pollsters aren’t successfully reaching enough white non-college voters relative to college-plus voters. Since red states like Nebraska, Iowa, and Kansas have relatively higher numbers of white non-college voters, the error there will be greater if pollsters are missing this cohort again.
Odder yet is how Democrats’ vast improvement in red states hasn’t been met with a similar polling surge(™) by Democratic Senate candidates in certain blue states, like Peggy Flanagan in Minnesota or Chris Pappas in New Hampshire.
“I just see warning signs of that with this idea that it looks like the Republicans are running stronger in the blue states, the Democrats are running stronger in the red states, and I tend to think that just doesn’t materialize,” Patrick Ruffini, the Republican pollster and founding partner of Echelon Insights, told us. “The fundamentals are going to end up mattering a lot more than we are maybe thinking right now.”
The polls aren’t directionally wrong. The president has a 38 percent approval rating, and voters think both he and the economy suck. It’s just a question of how good a Democratic year it will be after Republicans spend a billion dollars this month arguing that Democrats are communists who want to turn boys into girls. Ruffini’s latest poll, for example, had Democrats leading the generic ballot by 8 points. In a world like that, Democrats retake the House, flip a North Carolina Senate seat and maybe one or two more, but fall a few points short in various red-state Senate seats that Democrats began to fantasize about around Labor Day. That’s an outcome many Democrats would have locked in if they were asked a year ago. But it’s one that may come as a disappointment after the pollsters—those teases—got their hopes up about, like, Kansas.
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Photo by Silas Baisch on Unsplash, Brandon Bell/Getty Images, Sarah Rice/Getty Images, Vasyl Helevachuk/Getty Imges Plus, and tanarch/Adobe Stock.
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