Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
So we’re going to work through both the Fox poll and the debate over polling accuracy with Natalie Jackson, a polling expert who has her own firm, Centerline, and just wrote about the topic well, as a columnist for National Journal. Natalie, thanks so much for coming on.
Sargent: So just to establish something quickly: in your piece, you say that Democrats will win the House. You’re treating that as a foregone conclusion, not really in doubt, and that the only big question is whether Democrats have a big year or a really big year, as you put it, the latter meaning they win the Senate. Is that basically where we are?
Sargent: Right. You’re essentially saying that for Democrats to not have a pretty good night, at minimum, you’d need, like, a major systemic error that reaches into every corner of what we know right now, right?
Sargent: Right. So Fox News just dropped this poll that neatly underscores everything you’re saying here. The top lines are that he’s at a record-low approval of 36 percent, 74 percent rate the economy negatively, and Democrats lead by nine points in the generic ballot matchup, 54 to 45. If that proves correct, Natalie—and we don’t know that it will, which we’ll get into—but if it were, that would be the stuff of a wave election, right?
Fox’s numbers match up with mine. I ran a national poll just a couple of weeks ago. I had 35 percent approval among registered voters, eight-point Democratic advantage. So Fox is right there in line with what I’m finding and with what really everyone is. I believe the averages right now are around a nine percent Democratic advantage.
And all the polling averages that you can look at, whether it’s Nate Silver or FiftyPlusOne, you find the generic ballot matchup to be at around eight or nine points, or somewhere in the middle there. I mean, that’s where we are right now, right?
Sargent: Well, OK, a little more from the Fox poll. It’s incredible stuff. Trump’s approval among independents is 21 percent, with 78 percent disapproving. Among Latinos, his approval is 21 percent, with 79 percent disapproving. He’s even underwater with non-college whites, which are critical to his base, and that’s at 44 percent to 55 percent.
Jackson: It does. The only other president besides Trump in his first term that even comes close to this is George W. Bush when he was leaving office, really 2006 on. But he did not see numbers quite this low.
Sargent: Yeah. I mean, he is now rivaling the aftermath of January 6, and that’s just an incredible thing, considering that he essentially encouraged a violent attack on the seat of government.
Natalie, I think you can see a Democratic coalition kind of forming there. It includes winning back a ton of the Hispanics they lost to Trump in 2024, doing very well with independents, and keeping Republican margins down with blue-collar whites and rural whites as well.
Jackson: Right. The coalition that seems to be coming together is reminiscent of what we saw in 2020, when Biden won. We saw heavily Democratic Hispanics, heavily Democratic independents. It’s a really similar outlook. And absolutely keeping those margins down in the rural areas, among the non-college voters. That’s what Democrats have to do.
Now, especially among the younger generations—which Hispanics are, they do tilt younger than the rest of the population—they are not attached to either party. And they are also very heavily affected, directly affected, by the economy, by virtue of where they live, the types of industries they’re in. And so this is a group that’s going to swing, and we’re seeing a really hard swing against Trump.
I want to get at what the Fox poll shows about the economy as well. Donald Trump’s at 22 percent to 77 percent on inflation. Twenty-two percent on what’s clearly the biggest issue on the minds of voters right now. That’s barely more than one out of five that approve.
And I’ve got to think that looms large in some of these Senate races where Democrats have to win some Republican voters. These are states where Trump prevailed by double digits. And the only way Democrats can get there is by winning a chunk of Republicans. So if you’ve got non-MAGA Republicans disapproving of Trump, there’s a path for them, right?
There’s a contingent of Republicans that is very unhappy with Donald Trump. But on the other hand, they would—I’ve heard this said on cable news a couple of times—they would rather put their face in a wood chipper than vote for a Democrat. So it’s really a complicated picture, and we just don’t know what choice those non-MAGAs are going to make.
As you write, the big question is whether the polls are undercounting Republicans who aren’t that ginned up to vote, but might still end up turning out anyway and voting Republican. And maybe pollsters aren’t reaching those people.
Jackson: Yes. So, brief background: In 2016, in key states, polls underestimated Trump support. Trump ended up winning. In 2020, we thought Joe Biden was going to win very easily. It turned out polls underestimated Trump even more broadly that year. Biden still won, but it took us four days to learn that after the election. It was so close.
But what we’ve done in the meantime is, we weight our data to education now. So that might seem like something fairly obvious, but it was not a practice that pollsters did before, because we didn’t have a precise number for the number of people with college degrees in the electorate.
We also started weighting more on partisanship and partisanship indicators. Some pollsters will use the prior vote. So they’ll ask, for example, who did you vote for in the 2024 election? And then they’ll make sure they have the proper number of people who voted for each candidate.
So we’ve done a lot of adjusting to the methods behind polling. There is an element that we’re always fighting the last battle, because we don’t know what is missing or what might be going on until the election happens.
Can you talk about the fact that Fox and the New York Times are taking steps here to do what you’re talking about? Like, do you feel reassured? Can we look at their data and say they’re really trying to get to the right place on it?
And so one of the things that Fox and the New York Times do very well is they make sure on the front end that they have talked to a good mix of people. And those things take effort and they take money, which is why a lot of pollsters don’t do it. But these two are very reputable.
Fox knows that they’re really on the hook big time if they screw this up. So they’re really going to put in the effort to get to those Republican voters, aren’t they?
Sargent: I mean, Trump calls for the firing of the Fox pollsters pretty much every day at this point. Let me ask you, there’s also a scenario where Democrats could be undercounted. How would that happen?
That’s kind of the thing that we don’t know: do these Republicans actually stay home? Are we going through all these hoops trying to get them to answer the surveys, and then they don’t actually vote? That would be where error would come from, making Democrats have an even better year than what we’re looking at.
Jackson: It absolutely is. We are trying to guess who’s going to vote. This is the only time that we don’t know who we need to talk to for sure. If we’re talking to registered voters, great, we know who that is. We can take a good sample of that. All American adults, great. We know who they are. We know who we need to talk to.
Some of us aren’t using voter files. So we ask a series of questions. How likely are you to vote? Some people say I’m certain to vote. Some say I’m probably going to vote. Very few will tell you straight up, I am not going to vote.
Sargent: That is just fascinating stuff. All right, just to wrap this up. What’s your best guess as to the range of outcomes in terms of polling error here? Is it your sense that the polls that we’re seeing now are pretty close to accurate?
Some of the Senate polling I’m a little more concerned about. Some of the specifics of each state are a little bit harder to deal with. Some of the polling that we have is not very high quality. So I do think there’s potential to see two to four points, maybe even more, in some of these Senate races off of where the polls are.
Jackson: Probably. I worry a little bit about some of the specifics in these states, and the candidates, and just the little things that can come into play in an individual environment. But overall, yes, things are very good for Democrats. And no one is arguing that Republicans are going to come out of this ahead.
Jackson: Thanks.
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