You know, the ones that have been right instead of wrong
Abby Livingston at Puck talks to Tom Bonier about the polling. Bonier happens to have been one of those who’s been consistently right about the elections the last few years in contrast to pundits, pollsters and the media.
Abby Livingston: So, what happened last night?
Tom Bonier: In November 2022, we learned that abortion rights and the Dobbs decision was politically salient, but that it had its limitations, that it simply wasn’t a magic wand whereby people would universally vote more Democratic. We thought that the effect was uneven in places where the issue was literally on the ballot.
One of the challenges for Democrats over the intervening year was, how do we draw the connection between voting for Democratic candidates and protecting abortion rights?
The most interesting takeaways last night were in Ohio and Virginia. In Ohio, where there was a literal ballot initiative on guaranteeing abortion access, we saw very high turnout and a very wide margin for the “yes” vote to enshrine abortion protections in the state constitution. To me, that wasn’t new—it was in line with what we were seeing in other states with ballot initiatives.
In Virginia, however, both sides leaned into the abortion rights issue, more so than we’ve seen anywhere to date. Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s closing message was that this race was about abortion rights, and that electing Republicans to the legislature would essentially be a vote for a 15-week ban. I think he believed this could provide him with a mandate, and that he believed he had a sort of middle path on this issue—that 15 weeks was the compromise that Republicans were looking for. And what we saw was massive turnout in these targeted districts—in some cases, turnout exceeding 2021 (the last gubernatorial election year), which is amazing. And you clearly saw swing voters moving over to Democratic candidates based on this issue.
There was a question going into this year of whether the salience of the Dobbs decision and abortion rights would fade over time, or grow. But given that we’ve had a year now of people living with the decision, and you had this campaign centrally focused on the issue, we see that the salience is only increasing.
If there were ever a question of, should Democratic candidates be leaning into this more across the country—should they be leaning into it more, talking about it more, etcetera—the answer is clearly yes.
As I noted yesterday, Republicans are divided on what to do about this. Some want to try to finesse the issue with weasel words while others say they should double down and go for a complete ban. It’s hard to see who they can come to a consensus on this.
Asked about the Times-Sienna poll that had everyone tied up in knots, he says that some of the numbers are implausible like the idea that so many Black and young people would have turned sharply Republican. He thinks the poll does accurately register national discontent because of the turbulence we’re all living through.
This is key, I think:
Election nights were pretty consistent until 2016. Then Trump enters the picture. I would say 2018 and 2021 have been the only elections that seemed to go the way everyone thought. How much of this is about Trump and the chaos he has brought to American politics?
Almost entirely, to the extent that he has broken so much of our ability to analyze and predict electoral outcomes based on comparisons to past precedent. And not just him, as an individual, but the outcomes of his presidency—the Dobbs decision being one of them—where we are operating largely without precedent, or at least without a precedent that hews closely enough to what we are experiencing now to be particularly useful in accurately predicting electoral outcomes.
But another mistake we’re making is not recognizing the uniqueness of the historic moment we are in, primarily because of the Dobbs decision. There’s the state of the Republican Party, of course—the polarization, the anti-democratic elements. It’s a complex moment in our history. But in terms of recent precedent, where we look at the last two similar election cycles and try to benchmark from there, this moment doesn’t lend itself to that.
There are so many reasons now why a voter might say, “I don’t know who I’m going to vote for,” or, “I’m gonna vote for the other guy,” more as a very low-rung form of protest rather than a realistic threat, because of two wars going on, because of the threats to democracy, because of a general negative sense about our elected officials in Washington, a frustration with their inability to seemingly get things done. I think all of those things are reasons why the polls are going to diverge more from the actual results, especially the further we get out from Election Day.
The thing is that this narrative works well for Republicans and not for democrats. The Dems have done a lot, much more than I ever thought they could do, especially in this environment. And what we’ve learned is that actual results don’t matter if the country feels discontented with the political show they see on TV, whether it’s Republicans hating that their cult leader isn’t in the White House and is under indictment or the Democrats looking at the chaos Trump and the MAGA Republicans create every single day and think it’s all Biden’s fault for being too old and decrepit to stop it.
This is a huge advantage for Republicans and there’s really no way to counter it without cover up and normalizing what Republicans are doing. I think we just have to hope that at the end of the day, voters get a grip and recognize that the only way to put an end to this crazy era of political pandemonium is to defeat the MAGAs once and for all.