Yet while Democrats are bracing themselves for a wipeout at the ballot box next year, they may not know the true extent of their loss of support among voters. Polling before last year’s election, in which Biden only prevailed by fewer than 43,000 votes in three swing states, was the least accurate in 40 years.
Postmortem assessments are complicated and, largely, inconclusive. But several point to the likelihood that both Republican and Democratic polls — almost all of which favored Biden over President Trump — were off by an average of four percentage points; that most surveys likely oversampled liberal Democrats; that a surge of new voters could have contributed to the polling errors; and that Trump supporters were less likely to respond to pollsters because Trump repeatedly characterized them as “fake” or “suppression polls.” While 2022 will not be a presidential year, a study of 2020 polls by the American Association of Public Opinion Research found that “[t]he overstatement of the Democratic-Republican margin in polls was larger on average in senatorial and gubernatorial races compared to the Presidential contest. Last year Democrats poured record sums into Senate races in red states like Montana, South Carolina, Kentucky, Kansas and Iowa because the polling looked so promising — only to lose them all.
Certainly voter turnout can defy any polling predictions. But Democrats will have a rough time turning out their voters next year when the base of the party is likely to feel more disappointment than gratitude for the party’s accomplishments in 2021 and 2022, and the GOP base is likely to be highly energized.
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