Good news for J. D. Vance and Ohio Republicans! After a long stretch of polls that showed Democrat Tim Ryan in the lead, a new independent poll by Emerson College finds the race a little closer to what you would expect in a state that Donald Trump won by eight points, in what is supposed to be a good GOP year.
Emerson’s survey of 925 somewhat and very likely general-election voters finds Vance at 45 percent and Ryan at 42 percent. Four percent plan to vote for someone else and 10 percent are undecided. Another encouraging point is that Vance appears to have a higher ceiling if turnout increases. Spencer Kimball, executive director of Emerson College polling stated in the release that, “Both Vance and Ryan have strong bases of support, and the race tightens to a one-point lead for Vance among the very motivated and very likely voters in Ohio, whereas Vance leads by a larger margin among somewhat likely and somewhat motivated voters.”
With that said, a three-point lead doesn’t mean this race is locked away; Tim Ryan having the television airwaves to himself for about three months undoubtedly gave him some momentum, but that momentum may be blunted now that the Vance commercials are starting to air.
While I was away, my distinguished colleague Michael Brendan Dougherty wrote, “I’m getting vibes of 2014, when Tom Cotton and Mark Pryor were shown to be neck-and-neck in the summer, only for Cotton to pull away and ride the fundamentals in the end to a massive 17-point victory. The same dynamic played out in Kansas and Iowa.”
Look, maybe Vance will indeed end up winning by 17 points. And yes, back in August 2014, the Tom Cotton-Mark Pryor race was still tight. But Cotton was taking on a two-term incumbent, and the fact that polls were finding Pryor in the high 30s to low 40s (one CNN poll put it him at 47 percent) was a flashing neon sign that Arkansas voters were unhappy with what they had and were looking for other options. (I’d also note that after May, only two polls showed Pryor ahead.) In an open-seat race like Ohio’s this year, the dynamic is different.
And yes, I’ve heard the argument that the polling this cycle is still undersampling just about every demographic without college degrees, particularly whites without college degrees. And no doubt, in recent cycles, we’ve seen several pollsters all separately make the same mistakes in assessing the makeup of the electorate and likely winner.
Last cycle, we saw Quinnipiac almost single-handedly create the narrative that the South Carolina Senate race is a toss up (it never was), Thom Tillis narrowly won when all the polls showed a narrow lead for Cal Cunningham in North Carolina, and an absolutely insane miss in Maine’s Senate race, where Susan Collins won easily after every pollster showed her trailing, often by large margins. Lots of people remember those, and conclude the polls can never be trusted — or they can never be trusted when they show a result they don’t like. But they don’t remember the polls showing Mark Kelly winning in Arizona, John Hickenlooper winning in Colorado, Raphael Warnock winning in Georgia, Gary Peters winning in Michigan, etc.
Maybe we’ll get another result like that this year, where Republicans finish with significantly higher percentages on Election Night than what they had in the final polling averages. Your mileage may vary, but I think Republican campaigns would be whistling past the graveyard to conclude that, “We’re going to overperform our numbers in the public polls by a dramatic margin.”