The poll that shocked the nation

All week long, the media, both legacy and alternative, have been buzzing about this month’s New York Times/Siena College poll. It projects a shocking shift among a key demographic upon which the Democrats have always relied. In reply the Democrats’ play seems to be: deny, deny, deny. In fact they can do nothing else—because their favorite voters have abandoned them after they destroyed the basics.

What the NYT/Siena Poll says

Reportage on the New York Times/Siena College poll comes first from The New York Times itself. It includes the “crosstabs” (the tabulated results), Shane Goldmacher’s summary, and Nate Cohn’s attempt at an analysis. Siena College produced its own crosstabs that, oddly enough, do not match those of the Times. Siena College’s crosstabs refer to the total sample, while the Times refers to likely voters. We also have Fox News Channel’s reports on the poll itself and on media reaction to it.

The poll sample of 792 respondents favored the generic Republican by 49 percent to 45 percent. Last month Democrats won that question by one point; now they’re down by four. Democrats fell even further among independent women voters. As Goldmacher tells us:

In September, they favored Democrats by 14 points. Now, independent women backed Republicans by 18 points — a striking swing given the polarization of the American electorate and how intensely Democrats have focused on that group and on the threat Republicans pose to abortion rights.

This matches an interview with one Robin Ackerman, Democrat, age 37, and resident of New Castle, Delaware.

I’m shifting more towards Republican because I feel like they’re more geared towards business.

That could be because she has a job as a mortgage loan officer. But what about the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s? Answer: she does not care. She says she’s “worried about other things.”

Why are we bothering with this or any poll?

Yes, we’ve said before that polls, especially legacy media polls, are suspect. We’ve talked before about leftist self-selection bias, conservative fear bias, and why late summer and Labor Day polls skew left. We’ve also talked about how legacy media poll runners deliberately leave these biases in, seeking to affect the eventual outcome by creating a narrative. As the election draws closer, some of these biases go away, and polls become that much more difficult to skew.

But when a legacy media organ runs a poll, and gets a result they can’t skew without making their skew obvious, and when people are expecting them to make some report, they make it. They don’t dare not make it. The gains by the right in this poll vary from modest (total likely vote) to shocking (independent female vote). That a legacy media outlet must report even a modest Republican advantage in this Midterms, shows how great that advantage has become. No, this is no time for complacency. After all, the election is nearly three weeks away. But this poll tells Republicans exactly what they must emphasize above all else. To learn that, consider again those “other things” about which the Robin Ackermans of the same now worry about.

What are those other things?

The poll tells us exactly what troubles all demographics, without exception. The economy and inflation are Number One and Two among the concerns. Both crosstab sets show this. The “right” to end a pregnancy rates third at best, sometimes further back, and for most people, in single digits.

This goes directly to CNAV’s earlier discussion about an electorate wanting to get back to basics. A resident of Newtown, Connecticut put it best:

It’s all about cost. The price of gas and groceries are through the roof. And I want to eat healthy, but it’s cheaper for me to go to McDonald’s and get a little meal than it is to cook dinner.

If he, being a resident of a town where an infamous school shooting took place, shows any lingering desire to legislate taking weapons out of civilian hands, a favorite Democrat proposal, he either gave the pollsters no such indication, or they didn’t report what he said. In any event, Mr. Goldmacher noted that voters don’t want to hear about gun control as much as they did over the summer.

All that to show that voters are too concerned with keeping roofs over their heads and putting foot on their tables and water in their goblets, to worry about whether anyone other than themselves own guns, or whether a woman can end a pregnancy in a “red State” or not. The Democrats messed with the basics, and they will pay for that error. This poll shows it.

Deny, deny, deny!

The legacy media, and especially Democrats, want to deny this. Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), Speaker of the House, called this poll an outlier. Given who runs it, that’s a real grasping-at-straws thing to say.

Jen Psaki couldn’t believe another result one can glean from the crosstabs. While most voters accept the 2020 Presidential result as legitimate, a significant portion don’t care whether a candidate agrees with that or not. So long as they can trust that candidate to repair the damaged economy, their opinions on the Election of 2020 do not matter. At that, Jen Psaki literally cried, “Holy moly!”

Again, the basics. Everything else is marijuana-smoke-filled coffeehouse trash, voters know it, and Jen Psaki can’t handle it.

National Review reporter Charles C. W. Cooke agrees. He particularly says that “Roe-vember” isn’t happening as Democrats tried to make it happen.

Ed Morrissey at Hot Air would seem to agree:

But here’s Democratic Max Burns at The Daily Beast talking about outliers:

And here’s Ryan Cooper at The American Prospect lamenting what Robin Ackerman said. He called her the “kind of person” who will “decide if we get to live in a right-wing dictatorship.”

Chris Hayes at MSNBC says the only reason for these results is that gasoline prices went up again.

Lay aside who’s responsible for high gas prices. The rest of what he says, about inflation and the economy being no worse, is irrelevant.

The poll tells us that voters understand all too well

What’s relevant is that those things are bad, and voters know who made them bad. If they don’t know about the Great Reset, they have their suspicions. They certainly do know about the frantic legislative proposals from this administration, relatively few of which passed. And the one thing that did pass, has not helped, and voters know that, too.

And Democratic-sympathetic reporters know that they know. That’s why they babble on about outliers and right-wing dictatorships. They’re probably worried that Republicans will be able not only to impeach this President but also convict him. True enough, Democrats will likely have forty-seven seats in the Senate no matter what happens (within reason). But many of those forty-seven will have to face the voters two years from now. If they vote to acquit this President no matter what evidence Republican floor managers bring before the Senate, voters will associate them with Biden and find them guilty by that association. That will hold even if Biden loses the nomination – and he has indicated that nothing but death will stop him from seeking it.

But most of all: a poll by a left-leaning newspaper is not supposed to show Republicans winning. Period. End of memo. That’s why we can sum up Nate Cohn’s quibbling “analysis” in three words: “uh,” “uh,” and “ulp.” Three points or four; what’s the difference? A swing is still a swing, and we still have the thirty-two-point swing among independent women.

Any other questions?