Plenty of Republicans and pundits remember those failures, and have scoffed at this cycle’s polling as a result. Nate Cohn certainly remembers the polling flops too, and that’s why he writes today that all of the exuberance Democrats have indulged in summer polling may well be irrational all over again. In fact, the same polls in the same battlegrounds exhibit a similar lean, and Cohn doesn’t trust it:

That warning sign is flashing again: Democratic Senate candidates are outrunning expectations in the same places where the polls overestimated Mr. Biden in 2020 and Mrs. Clinton in 2016.

Wisconsin is a good example. On paper, the Republican senator Ron Johnson ought to be favored to win re-election. The FiveThirtyEight fundamentals index, for instance, makes him a two-point favorite. Instead, the polls have exceeded the wildest expectations of Democrats. The state’s gold-standard Marquette Law School survey even showed the Democrat Mandela Barnes leading Mr. Johnson by seven percentage points.

But in this case, good for Wisconsin Democrats might be too good to be true. The state was ground zero for survey error in 2020, when pre-election polls proved to be too good to be true for Mr. Biden. In the end, the polls overestimated Mr. Biden by about eight percentage points. Eerily enough, Mr. Barnes is faring better than expected by a similar margin.

The Wisconsin data is just one example of a broader pattern across the battlegrounds: The more the polls overestimated Mr. Biden last time, the better Democrats seem to be doing relative to expectations. And conversely, Democrats are posting less impressive numbers in some of the states where the polls were fairly accurate two years ago, like Georgia.

The most glaring indicator of potential irrational exuberance this summer hasn’t necessarily been the individual races, but in the generic polling. That began to narrow considerably over the summer just as the media was adopting a narrative that the Dobbs decision would fire up the Democrat base, especially women. Even while the economy and inflation continued to erode Americans’ real disposable income, the polls suddenly began moving away from the GOP and away from Joe Biden’s wretched job-approval numbers.

The only problem with that narrative was its basic assumptions on voter enthusiasm. As Philip Bump wrote last week, the assumption that Democrats and especially women would be energized for this cycle turned out to be exactly wrong. The most fired-up demographic as the midterms hit the home stretch are Republican men, and it’s not even close:

On Tuesday, I looked at the growing murmurs that American women in particular are going to flood the polls in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Protecting access to abortion in the wake of the dismantling of Roe v. Wade quickly became a rallying cry aimed at November — but polling doesn’t indicate that Democrats have seen a big surge in support from female voters.

In fact, data provided to The Washington Post by the polling firm YouGov indicate that the group that reports the most enthusiasm about voting is the polar opposite of what many expect: Republican men. And that this enthusiasm has grown. …

Democratic women reported more enthusiasm after the decision was released in late June, continuing an upward trend. But Democratic men expressed a much bigger surge in enthusiasm — one that was fairly short-lived.

Republican women, meanwhile, didn’t change their reported enthusiasm much following Dobbs. But more than half of Republican men now consistently report being more enthusiastic than in other years to vote in November. They’re the only group above that mark. Their reported enthusiasm has also been trending upward.

As I also noted at the time, the difference between generic-ballot results of registered voters and those using likely-voter screens had already been significant. The LV polls leaned noticeably more toward the GOP, even during the summer months of the “comeback” narrative. Only one LV poll in RCP’s aggregation showed a Democrat advantage, and that was only a D+1 in an Insider Advantage survey of 500 respondents. Plus, these polls almost certainly used a likely-voter model that would have attempted to capture the expected Roe-repeal effect, an effect that had yet to show up in a single contest over the summer.

Cohn notes that failure can almost be assumed, considering that the pollsters did next to nothing to correct their earlier failures:

If the polls are wrong yet again, it will not be hard to explain. Most pollsters haven’t made significant methodological changes since the last election. The major polling community post-mortem declared that it was “impossible” to definitively ascertain what went wrong in the 2020 election.

The pattern of Democratic strength isn’t the only sign that the polls might still be off in similar ways. Since the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision on abortion, some pollsters have said they’re seeing the familiar signs of nonresponse bias — when people who don’t respond to a poll are meaningfully different from those who participate — creeping back into their surveys.

With all of this, what do we do about polling? To quote The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: don’t panic. Now that we’re in the general election season (New Hampshire has the last primary tomorrow), we should only look at likely-voter poll results on the generic ballot and everywhere else. Those results show that a red wave is still coming, even if it might not reach the levels of the elevator scene in The Shining. Cohn sees it that way too, noting that GOP control of the House will be a “foregone conclusion” and that control of the Senate is still very much in play.

Second: focus on the fundamentals. The primary issues in play in any midterm are (a) the performance of the president and (b) the economy. Democrats can’t make a good argument on either, which is why Joe Biden has spent the last couple of weeks hyperventilating about “ultra-MAGA” voters and Donald Trump. The media wants to get conservatives distracted in debates over Trump rather than cover the performance of Biden and especially the economic and energy policies he has put in place.  Voters are not going to care about that when they will have to go to the grocery store and the gas station a dozen times each between Labor Day and Election Day.

Lastly, stay enthused. Get involved, and force the conversation back to the most important issues: Biden’s incompetence, inflation, the border crisis, and spiking levels of violent crime that Democrats have barely acknowledged while in power.

And on the polls themselves? Don’t ignore them, but consider them in context. We’ll watch them as well, but bear in mind that the pollsters are getting nervous about this as well. Watch for a sudden shift at the end when they finally adjust their LV models to something closer to reality — and perhaps that’s when we can take them more seriously, too.