President Joe Biden says he’s not ready to make a decision on whether to run for reelection. He did, however, dismiss polls that have cast a negative light on his 2024 chances, telling Telemundo, “Do you know any polling that’s accurate these days?”
Biden is upset because of recent polling findings that a lot of Democrats would be happy if he didn’t run and that put former President Donald Trump ahead of Biden (though within the margin of error) in a hypothetical 2024 contest.
To be clear, I believe Biden would very likely win the Democratic nomination and would have a good chance of winning a general election. But I have to defend the polling he went after.
Surveys are tools of the current moment (not fortune tellers), and those tools have, on the whole, done a good job of forecasting Biden’s and the Democratic Party’s political fates over the past few years.
Let’s start with the most recent election, when polling supposedly did poorly. It is true that some surveys underestimated Democratic candidates. The polls that meet CNN’s standards for publication, however, were quite good.
The national surveys looking at the generic congressional ballot had Republicans ahead by about 1.5 points over the last 21 days of the campaign. Republicans ended up winning the national House vote by a little less than 3 points. If you take out uncontested races – more Republicans than Democrats were unopposed in House contests last year – the final margin would probably have been closer to a 2-point Republican edge.
An error of less than 2 points (or 1 point) is really good.
The 2022 state-level polling was also above par. The average miss for gubernatorial elections was about 3 points, while it was less than 2.5 points in US Senate races. The previous average polling miss since 1998 had been above 5 points.
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