CommentsGUEST COMMENTARY - The media’s double standard with regards to what races are competitive is especially glaring, when it comes to the marquis Senate races...
in Arizona, Georgia and Pennsylvania and the lack of coverage of other potentially competitive races in New Hampshire or even Washington.
Only RealClearPolitics has taken historical and consistent polling errors and integrated it into their model for analysis. Prognosticators like Cook remain Democrat biased, and this is proven in their consistent misses in past cycles, with Nate Silver’s 538 among the worst offenders.
RCP’s projections are therefore much more to the right of the others currently projecting a 29 seat gain in the House and +3 in the Senate for Republicans.
It took a few cycles to get to this refined model for RCP. However, multiple cycles from 2016, 2018 and 2020 consistently underestimated Republican turnout, and this spurred the next logical step: assess the state-by-state bias and adjust accordingly.
What is this error attributed to? It is now proven that many rural folk, which is almost uniformly Republican now across the country, will not answer the pollsters, much less stay on the phone with them.
As most pollsters will adjust for this missing demographic (which includes many disaffected Democrats) by weighting more Republicans to match registration numbers, the problem is they are overweighting the voices of Republicans in urban or suburban areas who are much more anti-Trump, for example.
Because of this, states like Wisconsin are constantly Democrat favored in polls across the board by an average of 6 points, as their rural areas are underrepresented in polls.
This is why in the echo chamber of the media, Liz Cheney is seen as somehow credible as a status-quo-defying Republican when most of her party’s base see her as a joke with no political future.
This leads to my analysis on the high-profile Senate races in Georgia, Arizona and Pennsylvania. All three, I believe will go Republican fairly easily on Election Day.
The Hershel Walker race in Georgia was mired with the media’s attempt at a scandal, digging up an old girlfriend from the past with a supposed abortion, the stuff tabloids are made out of. It actually reminded me of the attempts to undermine now Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s credibility in 2018.
Thankfully, most people see through this and their priorities are better than the sensational dramas the media would like to conjure. As we can see, weeks after the “October surprise” dropped, Republican Hershel Walker, now pulls ahead of Democratic incumbent Ralph Warnock, who fundamentally has not set himself apart from his far left leadership, which is now being audited by the voters. As the undecideds come home, they’re breaking for the challenger.
Another race which has been the recipient of the most attention, their example as a blue blowout according to polling, is the Arizona race. Incumbent Mark Kelly, who has also not set himself apart (in stark contrast to his colleague Kyrsten Sinema), was supposedly pulling away in the summer and early fall with double digit leads against Republican Blake Masters.
But once again, the media buys its own hype. Kari Lake, the gubernatorial candidate and Masters, the senate candidate are now pulling away in polling into the lead or at least keeping it tied despite being tagged as supposedly extremist candidates, for the cardinal sin of being “election deniers”, a laughable media-fabricated smear on pretty much all Republican candidates this cycle. In such a partisan environment in Arizona, I do not see as much ticket splitting as in the past. And they will likely win comfortably.
I believe the fundamentals had been there from the start and it’s not one event that caused this shift. I argue the shift wasn’t even there. The trick of the media is to make you believe there’s more drama during the campaign trail than there really is. After all they want headlines and clicks. With a late primary, Republican voters are now just coming home but Mark Kelly was always stuck below 50.
The final race I will weigh in on is Pennsylvania. In this open seat race, Dr Mehmet Oz, the Republican now leads his first poll against Lt Governor Fetterman. In this case, there really could be a shift due to an event on the campaign trail. Fetterman has been the recipient of unprecedented media attention due to his stumbling of words and brain lapses, as a result of his stroke. The media is predictably trying to gin up a sympathy vote to help the Democrat.
However there is a debate within the left where many Democrats have expressed emotions from shock to the conclusion Fetterman is unfit to serve office. And now it makes sense that undecideds are now making a decision.
I must remind everyone that the race always showed a close one with the Democrat hovering around 45 percent. In a wave year, the challenging party, in 2022’s case, Republicans, will pick up most of the undecideds.
No matter how much they talk about abortion, Democrats consistently miss the electorate’s mood and most importantly they cannot see the frustration within their own party as the party focuses on messaging around abortion or January 6th to distract from their hand in destroying our economy and general incompetence on kitchen table matters.
This is why polls are now suddenly moving Republican and the Republicans will win these three races, JD Vance in Ohio, Ron Johnson in Wisconsin and Adam Laxalt in Nevada. Watch for an upset in blue seats that are not even currently on the radar, like New Hampshire, Washington and Colorado. It’s already happening in the gubernatorial races as deep blue New York is now a tossup race.
(Marc Ang ([email protected]) is a community organizer in Southern California and the founder of Asian Industry B2B and regular contributor to CityWatchLA.com. He focuses on the minority conservative experience. Marc’s book “Minority Retort” will be released on November 9, 2022 through Trinity Broadcasting Network.)