Democrats control both houses of Congress \u2014 but just barely.<\/p>\n
Cast your mind back to October 2020, and you might remember expecting things to turn out a bit different. Polls suggested that Democratic House candidates were on track to nearly match their historic margins in the 2018 midterms. But that didn\u2019t happen.<\/p>\n
For the second presidential cycle in a row, Democrats were stunned by the number of voters who came out in support of Donald J. Trump and his Republican allies down the ballot.<\/p>\n
This week, the House Democrats\u2019 campaign arm, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, presented the results of an inquiry into the 2020 election, aimed at understanding what had gone askew for the party \u2014 and why, after the corrections that pollsters made in the wake of 2016, surveys were still missing the mark.<\/p>\n
The report came to two interrelated conclusions, Representative Sean Patrick Maloney, the campaign committee chairman, said in a phone interview today. One is that Trump voters are disproportionately likely to refuse to take a poll, a conclusion echoed in other post-mortem reports that have recently been released by private Democratic pollsters. The other is that Mr. Trump\u2019s presence on the ballot appears to have driven up turnout among the Republican base.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn 2020, what we realized is that the polling error really equaled Trump turnout,\u201d Mr. Maloney said. \u201cSo in polling, you\u2019ve got this mistake in the assumption about what the electorate will look like.\u201d<\/p>\n
Because support for Mr. Trump lines up with a relative unwillingness to be polled, survey researchers may think they\u2019ve reached the right share of, say, rural-dwelling, white men without college degrees. But in fact what they\u2019ve reached is often a Democratic-skewing<\/em> segment<\/em> of that demographic.<\/p>\n In 2018, when polls were relatively accurate, this didn\u2019t factor in as much, presumably because the most anti-institutional and anti-polling voters were also those who were likely to turn out only if Mr. Trump himself was on the ballot.<\/p>\n In 2020, Mr. Trump\u2019s popularity with a typically low-turnout base meant that an upsurge in turnout actually helped Republicans more than Democrats \u2014 a rare occurrence. \u201cBecause low-propensity voters turned out for Trump in much higher numbers than our low-propensity voters turned out for us, it ripples through the data and has a big effect,\u201d Mr. Maloney said.<\/p>\n He has been through this process before: In 2017, after Mr. Trump\u2019s upset win over Hillary Clinton, the congressman, then in his third term, led an inquiry into what had gone wrong for the Democrats. That work helped put him in position for his current role as the head of the party\u2019s House campaign arm.<\/p>\n This time around, he put together a team including campaign consultants, academics and other Democratic members of Congress, and they assembled what he called \u201ca first-of-its-kind national polling database,\u201d drawing from over 600 polls of House races, as well as voter-file and other local-level data.<\/p>\n Last year, because Democrats underestimated the extent to which Mr. Trump\u2019s presence on the ballot would drive up Republican turnout, their strategists mistakenly thought that a number of seats that had flipped blue in the 2018 midterms would remain safe in 2020. Six Democrats who had won for the first time in 2018 lost their 2020 races by less than two percentage points.<\/p>\n Mr. Maloney said he was only half-swayed by arguments that ascribed a lot of impact to Republican attacks on the \u201cdefund the police\u201d movement and \u201cdemocratic socialism.\u201d He said that the messenger had been far more important than the message.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat you realize is that it is true that the lies and distortions about socialism and \u2018defund\u2019 carried a punch \u2014 no argument from me,\u201d Mr. Maloney said.<\/p>\n \u201cBut I think the power of those lies has been exaggerated when you understand that Trump,\u201d he added, was responsible for turning out \u201ca bunch of people who were going into the voting booth.\u201d<\/p>\n In next year\u2019s midterms, he said that Republicans would be running a risk if they were counting on Trump-level engagement from base voters, given that his name wouldn\u2019t be on the ballot.<\/p>\n \u201cIt leads you to ask: Will this post-Trump toxicity of QAnon and conspiracy theories and Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene and the attack on the Capitol \u2014 will that message work without Trump\u2019s turnout?\u201d Mr. Maloney said. \u201cThe research suggests that they have taken too much comfort in the power of messages that were effective, yes, but that were enormously helped by Trump\u2019s power to turn out voters.\u201d<\/p>\n Still, he cautioned against taking comfort in the results of the report, which at the end of the day serves as a reminder of just how out-of-reach an entire swath of the population remains \u2014 for mainstream pollsters and Democratic candidates alike.<\/p>\n On the tactics front, the report concluded that in the context of the coronavirus pandemic, Democratic spending had been heavily tilted away from grass-roots campaigning and toward TV ads, which mostly ran late in the campaign and ended up doing little to tip things in the party\u2019s favor.<\/p>\n Going forward, Mr. Maloney said, he plans to keep the 600-poll database in use. The D.C.C.C. has already been using it in special elections this year to analyze messages for effectiveness.<\/p>\n \u201cWe think there\u2019s a lot to learn, we\u2019re going to learn as we go, and you\u2019re always building the ship as you\u2019re sailing it,\u201d he said. \u201cIn this case it\u2019s important that we apply what we\u2019ve learned to as many contexts as we can.\u201d<\/p>\n