Prognosticators Have Never Learned How To Rate Races In A Wave Election-- And Pollsters Can't Get Their Models Straight

Polls are all based on "likely voters." A campaign manager I was talking to last week was in a rush because he was still dragging homeless people onto buses to feed them sandwiches, etc and get them to the early voting stations. Over a thousand. Likely voters? Not a chance. Early voting shows "unexpected" upturns for women voters, black voters, Latino voters and millennials voters. How many extra seats is that worth to the Democrats beyond what the pollsters and prognosticators predicted? 10? 20? 30?

Last week Time Magazine warned them: Youth Voter Turnout in the Midterm Elections Could Be Historic, According to a New Poll. "Young voters could turn out to vote at record-breaking levels in the midterm elections next month, according to a new poll. The poll, released Monday by the Institute of Politics at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, found 40% of 18 to 29-year-olds say they will 'definitely vote' in the midterm elections on Nov. 6. Youth voter turnout has historically been dismal in midterm elections, which tend to draw fewer voters overall than presidential election years. The highest rate of youth voter turnout in past midterm elections was 21% in both 1986 and 1994, according to the Harvard report... In the 2014 midterm elections, 19.9% of adults under 30 voted-- 'the lowest rate of youth turnout recorded in the past 40 years.' In the 2016 presidential election, 46.1% of adults under 30 voted-- an increase from 2012, but still the lowest turnout rate of any age group."

In this year’s poll, a larger percentage of young Democrats (54%) than young Republicans (43%) indicated they were likely to vote.. Overall, 66% of respondents supported Democrats taking back control of Congress, compared to 32% for Republican control.

So how's that working out today? We don't know yet, but what we do know is that millennials turned out big in early voting. Yesterday, the Washington Post reported that early voting is pointing to a "Youth Wave."

Youth turnout rates in the midterm early vote are up by 125 percent compared to 2014, according to Catalist, a voter database servicing progressive organizations-- an eye-popping and historically high figure, say strategists on both the left and the right.

Young Americans ages 18 to 29 who say they are definitely voting tilt leftward, according to polls. But the data also shows young Republicans are bubbling with enthusiasm headed into tomorrow.

...2020 implications: Among young people polled, 59 percent said they would “never” vote for President Trump vs. 11 percent who said they'd be “sure to” vote for him.

... GOP pollster Chris Wilson, the CEO of WPA Intelligence, told us he thought it was a “bit too much” to call the turnout “historic.” But he said the electorate is looking younger “than both the 2016 and 2014 general elections. “Voters under 25 are outpacing their vote share from both the 2016 and 2014 general. Proportionately it’s not enough to make a huge difference, but it’s more,” Wilson said.

Nine months after 17 students were killed in a mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., Della Volpe's firm, SocialSphere, found that school shootings are the most worrisome issue to young Americans.

Surge in activism = a surge in voting: Tom Bonier, a Democratic  strategist and head of the firm Targetsmart, told us that skeptics initially cast doubt on the firm's findings that the “share of youth registrants nationwide increased by 2.16 percent” after the Parkland shooting in February.  A September memo showed that turnout among young people increased by an average of 4 percent in the 2018 primaries vs. 2014 primaries-- and doubled in some battleground states compared to 2014. Per Bonier, “Pennsylvania . . . has seen youth voter registration surge by 10 points after [Parkland]. Youth voters make up nearly 60 percent of all new Pennsylvania registrants.”

The mass shooting generation is showing up: We spoke with Jackie Corin, co-founder of March for Our Lives, who voted for the first time last week. Corin, along with a handful of her peers, has been traveling the country, meeting with lawmakers and mass shooting survivors, speaking on college campuses and visiting communities to build what the group calls a “youth infrastructure” to carry over into 2020. 

• Civic engagement is cool: “Activism is becoming more of a normalized activity for teenagers-- they are seeing their friends get involved with campaigns and issues and it’s spreading like wildfire,” Corin added.
• Twitter working against Trump?: Corin also credited the spike in awareness and engagement to Trump's Twitter habits. “The president uses Twitter as main source of communication and that’s something that young people see every single day-- they’re always on Twitter and Instagram so they're more engaged about what's going on.”
• Real progress: Since the Parkland shooting that killed 17, over 60 state laws have been passed tightening gun control. “The constant mass shootings are large motivators … it’s what has activated thousands and thousands of people across this country,” Corin said.

We still don't know if the shift pollsters are seeing in early voting will be reflected at the ballot box.

So far today, it very much looks like it is. Meanwhile, everyone agrees that the likeliest of likely voters are seniors, particularly retirees. It's undeniable that they vote more than any other age group and that in recent decades that have been more prone to vote Republican. That party preference seems to have flipped on its head this cycle. Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal reported that campaign donors "who identify their occupation as 'retired' gave 52% of the $326 million they contributed through Oct. 17 to Democrats, compared with 48% to Republicans according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. That is a reversal of their split four years ago-- and it’s a record amount of midterm money from retirees. This is the first midterms since the group began keeping donor industry data in 1990 in which retirees favor Democrats over Republicans. That year, retirees gave 76% of their $15 million in contributions to Republicans and 24% to Democrats. As social security and Medicare have become hot-button political issues, retiree donors have steadily crept toward Democrats, the center’s data show. By 2002, the GOP advantage among retiree donors had declined to 63% versus 36%. Eight years later, the split was 55%-44%."