Dan Osborn’s campaign convinced a whole bunch of gullible reporters and columnists that the race was neck-and-neck, just by releasing internal polls.
For a while now, I’ve been skeptical about Democratic claims that the Bernie Sanders–supporting, so-called independent Dan Osborn is going to derail the GOP’s Senate majority hopes by defeating Nebraska’s incumbent GOP senator, Deb Fischer. This is not because I am a rah-rah cheerleader for Fischer. This is just because I am instinctively doubtful about little-known challengers attempting to knock off a GOP incumbent senator in a state that Trump is going to win by 15 to 20 percentage points, and I’m even more skeptical when the DSCC won’t even mention the race as a priority while talking up Florida and Texas.
For a long stretch, there was no independent polling of this Senate race, just dueling polls commissioned by the Osborn and Fischer campaigns. I know this is going to shock you, but the polls released by the Osborn campaign showed him ahead, and the polls released by the Fischer campaign showed her ahead. Finally, a few days ago, the New York Times/Siena poll showed Fischer narrowly ahead, 48 percent to 46 percent — not a great spot for an incumbent, but you’d rather be ahead by two percentage points than trailing by two percentage points.
Now a new Economist/YouGov poll finds Fischer ahead, 50 percent to 43 percent. Nobody has a crystal ball, but Fischer appears to be on pace to win, but by a narrower margin than we’re used to seeing for a GOP incumbent in a red state.
If Fischer wins comfortably — and I’d say a seven-point margin is comfortable — the Osborn campaign will have convinced a whole bunch of gullible reporters and columnists that the race was neck-and-neck, just by releasing internal polls.
There’s nothing wrong with writing a profile of an underdog candidate, as long as you don’t mislead readers into believing that they’re about to witness a remarkable longshot victory. And yet we’ve seen coverage that treated Osborn as if he’s got a realistic shot to win from Vox to Michelle Goldberg of the New York Times to ABC News to the Associated Press to CNN to MSNBC to Roll Call to Time magazine to New York magazine to Newsweek — touting an Osborn-commissioned poll showing him ahead by five points — to Slate and beyond.
I expect this kind of starry-eyed ya-gotta-believe wish-casting coverage from the likes of Daily Kos and Rolling Stone. But other allegedly mainstream institutions are supposed to be a little less willing to buy a Democratic campaign’s spin.
We see this every farshtunken cycle, the all-too-credulous coverage of the Democrat who’s going to win in a deep-red state — Beto O’Rourke in Texas, Jaime Harrison in South Carolina, Alison Lundergan Grimes in Kentucky. (In 2013, Politico wrote of Grimes, “the fresh Democratic face could give the Senate minority leader the fight of his political life.” Mitch McConnell won reelection, 56 percent to 40 percent, in what was not the fight of his political life.)