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What I Got Wrong In 2022

By Nathaniel Rakich

Dec. 28, 2022, at 6:00 AM


Here’s a prediction that 100 percent, absolutely, positively will come true: I will get something wrong in 2023. Here at FiveThirtyEight, we make a lot of predictions every year; some of them work out, but we can’t get every single one right.  We can, however, learn from our mistakes. That’s why I like to write about everything I got wrong in the previous 12 months.1 I do this for two reasons: First, they’re often unintentionally hilarious (and when you’re a politics reporter, sometimes you need a laugh); second, identifying my blind spots has helped me become a better analyst.

And there’s no shortage of material for this year’s installment. Let’s start with a tweet I wrote on Nov. 6, 2020, shortly after it became clear that Joe Biden had won the presidential race: “Congratulations to Republicans on their victory in the 2022 midterms!” This was obviously meant to be snarky but also to communicate a political tenet: that the president’s party almost always has a bad midterm election. Of course, that tweet wasn’t from 2022, but I also made this argument in January of this year. And for several months thereafter, my analysis was colored by my expectation that 2022 would be a good election year for Republicans. As everyone knows by now, the midterms were a disappointment for Republicans. They won the House — but only barely (they gained just nine seats on net). Meanwhile, Democrats gained a seat in the Senate.



Clearly, I was overly confident in my early prediction. While it is true that the president’s party almost always has a poor midterm, there have been exceptions. And the 2022 midterms turned out to be one of these “asterisk elections,” thanks in no small part to the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization to overturn the constitutional right to abortion. This year I should have been more prepared for the possibility that the ruling could throw a wrench into the election, especially after a draft of the decision was leaked in May. And even after the decision, it took me a while to become convinced that voter anger over Dobbs would prove durable enough to last until Election Day.

It wasn’t until the fall that I revised my expectations from a “red wave” to a “red ripple.” My biggest mistake here was not realizing just how common an “asterisk election” actually is. I often quoted one key stat: that the president’s party had gained House seats in only two of the previous 19 midterm elections. But there were four other midterms where the president’s party lost fewer than 10 House seats — so what happened in 2022 isn’t that rare. I also neglected to remember that the president’s party had lost Senate seats in only 13 of the last 19 midterms. In other words, midterms like 2022 happen about a third of the time — way too frequently to count them out.

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https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/2022-predictions-i-got-wrong/

The ‘Red Wave’ Washout: How Skewed Polls Fed a False Election Narrative

By Jim Rutenberg, Ken Bensinger and Steve Eder
Dec. 31, 2022

Senator Patty Murray, a Democrat, had consistently won re-election by healthy margins in her three decades representing Washington State. This year seemed no different: By midsummer, polls showed her cruising to victory over a Republican newcomer, Tiffany Smiley, by as much as 20 percentage points.

So when a survey in late September by the Republican-leaning Trafalgar Group showed Ms. Murray clinging to a lead of just two points, it seemed like an aberration. But in October, two more Republican-leaning polls put Ms. Murray barely ahead, and a third said the race was a dead heat.

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Ms. Murray’s own polling showed her with a comfortable lead, and a nonprofit regional news site, using an established local pollster, had her up by 13. Unwilling to take chances, however, she went on the defensive, scuttling her practice of lavishing some of her war chest — she amassed $20 million — on more vulnerable Democratic candidates elsewhere. Instead, she reaped financial help from the party’s national Senate committee and supportive super PACs — resources that would, as a result, be unavailable to other Democrats.

A similar sequence of events played out in battlegrounds nationwide. Surveys showing strength for Republicans, often from the same partisan pollsters, set Democratic klaxons blaring in Pennsylvania, New Hampshire and Colorado. Coupled with the political factors already favoring Republicans — including inflation and President Biden’s unpopularity — the skewed polls helped feed what quickly became an inescapable political narrative: A Republican wave election was about to hit the country with hurricane force. Democrats in each of those states went on to win their Senate races. Ms. Murray clobbered Ms. Smiley by nearly 15 points.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/31/us/politics/polling-election-2022-red-wave.html