I feel like we’ve had plenty of cautionary tales about polling. I appreciate your analyses, Simon, but 2016 has at the very least left me wary of polls. Let’s get the people to the actual polls!
Yes, I don't think many of the pundits realize how truly PISSED so many of us are. Maybe the country is ready for big change. It will be interesting to see what plays out in Michigan.
Emerson regularly polls for right-aligned groups now, and their national data tracks right leaning pollsters. Here's an example from the NJ Gov's race which Sherill won by 14.4 pts:
This poll was paid for by a Nexstar TV station and the Hill, right-aligned media organizations.
"The race for Governor of New Jersey between Democrat Mikie Sherrill and Republican Jack Ciattarelli is tied, 43%-43%, with 11% still undecided, according to a new Emerson College Polling/Pix 11/The Hill poll released his morning.
This is the first poll since 2024 in which Sherrill, a four-term congresswoman, is not in the lead, either in the Democratic primary or in a head-to-head matchup with Ciattarelli in the general election. This independent poll mirrors an internal poll conducted by Ciattarelli campaign pollster Adam Geller that put the race at one point: 46% for Ciattarelli and 45% for Sherrill."
Mirrors internals from the Republican campaign - this was all a big right wing op.
I don't pay any attention to Nate Silver's work. He is an advisor to the crypto company Polymarket, which is backed by Peter Thiel.
Sherrill's final margin was 14.4 not 13 (it grew as the votes were counted).
"The Red Wave Pollsters Took A Huge Credibility Hit - Mikie Sherrill won 56%-43% (+13). Not a single independent poll showed the race within margin of error, ever. Here is how the red wavers imagined it in the closing days:
Atlas Intel Sherrill 50%-49% (+1)
Emerson Sherrill 50%-48% (+2)
co/efficient Sherrill 48%-47% (+1)
Quantas Sherrill 49%-46% (+3)
Neighborhood Sherrill 44%-44% (even)
Trafalgar/IA Sherrill 45%-44% (+1) IA = Insider Advantage
All of them were off by 10% points or more.
These guys are to polling what Fox News is to news."
Republicans spend a lot of money on this narrative polling and some formerly independent pollsters take the money to pay the bills. And once they do it once they are forever right-aligned.
Ellen as you recall I rose to prominence a few years ago by calling out the right for these illicit tactics. It is disappointing to see it now practiced on our side. As I've written elsewhere the Fight Agency who are running El-Sayed's campaign and were the force behind Platner are a little too comfortable with gaslighting in my view.
Obviously you know more about polling than I do, but I do recall that Emerson was relatively accurate in some of their recent NYC polling, both in the 2025 mayoral race and in the 2026 Congressional races. I agree that the glut of polling in the last week in Michigan is ridiculous. For those of us who suffered through recent primaries in NY-12 and other Congressional districts where there was barely any public polling, it seems crazy to release five or more polls in less than a week.
good analysis. but these numbers they are putting up for el sayed are shocking imho. i heard him interviewed on new yorker radio and i did not like what i heard. i don't like how he polls against the gop candidate either. i saw analysis this morning that criticized stevens for trying to rely on the black vote, saying that is not enough. well, we'll see. i thought sayed seemed reasonable on health care but as he was pressed on gaza and his association with hasan piker, he could not answer substantively. granted, the middle east is a hard place for a senator or anyone else to come up with solutions, but then, don't make it the centerpiece of your campaign.....then turn around as he did and say well, i'm running to represent michigan, and that's my primary concern. can't have it both ways. that was what i took away from it, anyway.
Stevens is regularly polling ahead in the general election put in the last El-Sayed poll by Zenith they have her at 34% in the Democratic primary. Yes, it's a bit wild. Not sure I've ever seen data like this before. But we will find out on Tuesday.
Agree completely. I saw his rally yesterday—carried live on FOX (!)—and he was weak, spending too much time saying how he’d been told no one with his name could get elected, AIPAC again, etc. wasn’t impressed.
In the NYT polls of battleground Senate races the total number of people citing any foreign policy issue as a primary reason they were voting for someone was 3%. The centering of Israel in their narrative runs against everything that everyone believes how we are going to win the general. I don't think a single candidate we've interviewed this year has even brought it up. It's a voting issue for a very, very small number of people.
That’s right. The outstanding candidates profiled on Hopium did not raise issues—other than Trump or Trump adjacent (R) issues—outside their districts. El-Sayed may be counting on the 101K Dearborn “Uncommitted” vote from the 2024 Democratic primary to put him over the top. Unlikely. We’ll see.
Simon and friends... Exxon net profits Q2 hit $14.5 billion thanks to gas profits while fires
raged throughout Europe, Canada and all around the US. My state, California, has lost 3 towns
Pacific Palisades, Paradice and Altadena in the last few years. Yet our candidates, as far as I know,
just talk about gas prices and affordability which everyone knows about. And the "Dem Socialists"
think "defeating Israel (the Zionists!)" somehow is more important. I'll give them a REAL issue from the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS). Trump is closing or closed 57 of our 77 research centers
who predict and manage wildfires. What's going to be in our living room first? A fire or a ZIonist?
I respect your work, but it seems to me you are using the polls you like to do exactly what you are suggesting the El-Sayed campaign has done for different reasons. I wish we could just focus on the issues and let the voters choose. Do they think medicare for all is an idea whose time has come, or do they think it's a pipe dream and we should moderate our goals? Should we get big money out of politics, or is that unrealistic? etc. The voters in Michigan have a choice between two visions. I thought that was the healthy democracy that we're supposed to be defending. I'm ready to work hard for whoever wins, after the primary, which will come soon enough.
Kim, I am not cherry picking any polls. I just analyzed the data in front of us, which is consistent with a broad concern that many have about the ability of a far left candidate to win in the battleground. Given the stakes of the election these are reasonable things to discuss. We want to win here. Period. I am not also not happy about their flooding the zone with favorable polls, and what this means for elections in the future.
While I personally prefer Stevens to win on Tuesday, do we have faith that her camp in line with Whitmer, Slotkin, and others will go ‘all in’ should AES win on Tuesday, to help ensure he defeats Rogers? Peggie Dinghal made the overarching point that MI was a must keep and no matter who won, we should put aside all ‘politics’ to defend the incumbent seat 🤷🏻♂️🙏.
jonathan chait goes into a deep dive about how the dsa uses issues like mfa while obscuring their other, less popular ideas. while i would love to see mfa, it's not like it has proven to be something voters will crawl over broken glass to get, and moreover, we don't have to use that model for universal healthcare...countries like holland and switzerland do not, and still cover everyone. i think the aca could get us there. too many americans do not want to give up on their own private insurance, and don't like the idea of those "other people" getting "free healthcare.' we've been trying to get some sort of medicare system up and running since truman....and we don't get anywhere. that's why the aca was a big effin deal.....moreover, i see el sayed talking a lot about aipac, gaza, genocide etc then backtracking and saying well, gee whiz, i'd just be a senator from michigan and my job would be only to help michigan school children get enough to eat....which is actually a state issue, not a federal one. he posits money could go to michigan instead of israel. i do not think this is a winning message in a general election. it has me worried a bit. but i cannot vote there. so it is not up to me.
Sunday can be a day of renewal and forward thinking. I found this sixteen minute OpEd Video by Ezra Klein to be a worthwhile expression of forward looking hopeful thinking. What begins as commentary on Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey quickly expands to become a strong critique of the moral bankruptcy at the core of the MAGA movement and other right wing populist movements globally (including what Mr. Rosenberg refers to as “Greater MAGA”). This critique echos comments Mr. Rosenberg frequently makes regarding strength vs. weakness in right wing rhetoric. Mr. Klein ends with an articulation of a way forward in terms of renewal and regeneration of the values that make civil society civilized (including recognizing that the cruelty at the core of MAGA is weakness not strength). I found this vision very similar to the vision I hear Mr. Rosenberg articulate when he speaks of a new birth of freedom, at home and abroad.
I hope each of Messrs. Klein and Rosenberg are correct that the moment is at hand to seize this opportunity for renewal. Each of them notes, however, that such transformations do not happen spontaneously; they happen when good people of good will do the hard work to enable them. The hope for such better days ahead is what brought me to Hopium and what keeps me here.
Brian Tyler Cohen and Marc Elias speak about Accountability, for Piro, Blanche and others legal abusers particularly with their state bars in the wake of the kayak olympian's reflecting pool case being dropped.
I looked it up and discovered MI has open primaries. I don't know if GOP voters could vote in both the GOP and DEM primaries, but I wonder if some of them might opt to vote for El-Sayed in the primary and then Rogers in the general election. I also wonder how the polling is done in a state with open primaries. I don't know anything about that.
I'm still concerned with the S(L)AVE Act. It looks like the parliamentarian has to take it out of the budget reconciliation. I hate that we are always balancing on the edge of a knife between a legitimate democratic republican and fascism without legitimate elections. I don't trust the GOP to not nuke the filibuster if Trump doesn't allow them to get anything done.
I will try to postcard out of this. Every little bit helps.
Simon, the pushback against your analysis in Michigan and Maine by Hopium members continues to be surprising to me. I found you because of you and Tom's insistence that there would be no "Red Wave" in 2022 - if I recall right, you two were the only election analysts calling it BS. That impressed me. And of course you were right! Your 35 year career in the politics business impresses me. I trust your conclusions and I've learned a lot from you. Why would I be a committed member of Hopium if I wanted to argue with you over polling of all things? Thank you for your non-biased analysis. It's been really helpful to me!
People have to be crazy to vote Republican!!!!
I feel like we’ve had plenty of cautionary tales about polling. I appreciate your analyses, Simon, but 2016 has at the very least left me wary of polls. Let’s get the people to the actual polls!
Yes, I don't think many of the pundits realize how truly PISSED so many of us are. Maybe the country is ready for big change. It will be interesting to see what plays out in Michigan.
You write "Let’s assume El-Sayed is ahead in the primary despite the lack of high quality, independent polling here." Does this mean that you don't consider Emerson to be "high quality independent polling."https://emersoncollegepolling.com/michigan-2026-poll-abdul-el-sayed-leads-haley-stevens-for-democratic-us-senate-nomination/. Nate Silver gives it an A. https://www.natesilver.net/p/pollster-ratings-silver-bulletin. I don't know about any of the other polls that came out this week but I thought Emerson was considered high quality and independent.
Emerson regularly polls for right-aligned groups now, and their national data tracks right leaning pollsters. Here's an example from the NJ Gov's race which Sherill won by 14.4 pts:
https://newjerseyglobe.com/fr/sherrill-ciattarelli-tied-in-new-emerson-poll/
This poll was paid for by a Nexstar TV station and the Hill, right-aligned media organizations.
"The race for Governor of New Jersey between Democrat Mikie Sherrill and Republican Jack Ciattarelli is tied, 43%-43%, with 11% still undecided, according to a new Emerson College Polling/Pix 11/The Hill poll released his morning.
This is the first poll since 2024 in which Sherrill, a four-term congresswoman, is not in the lead, either in the Democratic primary or in a head-to-head matchup with Ciattarelli in the general election. This independent poll mirrors an internal poll conducted by Ciattarelli campaign pollster Adam Geller that put the race at one point: 46% for Ciattarelli and 45% for Sherrill."
Mirrors internals from the Republican campaign - this was all a big right wing op.
I don't pay any attention to Nate Silver's work. He is an advisor to the crypto company Polymarket, which is backed by Peter Thiel.
I wrote about the big op they ran in NJ here - https://www.hopiumchronicles.com/p/my-2025-election-recap-blue-wave
Sherrill's final margin was 14.4 not 13 (it grew as the votes were counted).
"The Red Wave Pollsters Took A Huge Credibility Hit - Mikie Sherrill won 56%-43% (+13). Not a single independent poll showed the race within margin of error, ever. Here is how the red wavers imagined it in the closing days:
Atlas Intel Sherrill 50%-49% (+1)
Emerson Sherrill 50%-48% (+2)
co/efficient Sherrill 48%-47% (+1)
Quantas Sherrill 49%-46% (+3)
Neighborhood Sherrill 44%-44% (even)
Trafalgar/IA Sherrill 45%-44% (+1) IA = Insider Advantage
All of them were off by 10% points or more.
These guys are to polling what Fox News is to news."
Republicans spend a lot of money on this narrative polling and some formerly independent pollsters take the money to pay the bills. And once they do it once they are forever right-aligned.
Ellen as you recall I rose to prominence a few years ago by calling out the right for these illicit tactics. It is disappointing to see it now practiced on our side. As I've written elsewhere the Fight Agency who are running El-Sayed's campaign and were the force behind Platner are a little too comfortable with gaslighting in my view.
Nice to see you Ellen!
Obviously you know more about polling than I do, but I do recall that Emerson was relatively accurate in some of their recent NYC polling, both in the 2025 mayoral race and in the 2026 Congressional races. I agree that the glut of polling in the last week in Michigan is ridiculous. For those of us who suffered through recent primaries in NY-12 and other Congressional districts where there was barely any public polling, it seems crazy to release five or more polls in less than a week.
How do they do primary polling in states with open primaries like MI appears to be? It seems like an additional level of difficulty.
What’s in the water in Maine? Geez!
good analysis. but these numbers they are putting up for el sayed are shocking imho. i heard him interviewed on new yorker radio and i did not like what i heard. i don't like how he polls against the gop candidate either. i saw analysis this morning that criticized stevens for trying to rely on the black vote, saying that is not enough. well, we'll see. i thought sayed seemed reasonable on health care but as he was pressed on gaza and his association with hasan piker, he could not answer substantively. granted, the middle east is a hard place for a senator or anyone else to come up with solutions, but then, don't make it the centerpiece of your campaign.....then turn around as he did and say well, i'm running to represent michigan, and that's my primary concern. can't have it both ways. that was what i took away from it, anyway.
Stevens is regularly polling ahead in the general election put in the last El-Sayed poll by Zenith they have her at 34% in the Democratic primary. Yes, it's a bit wild. Not sure I've ever seen data like this before. But we will find out on Tuesday.
Agree completely. I saw his rally yesterday—carried live on FOX (!)—and he was weak, spending too much time saying how he’d been told no one with his name could get elected, AIPAC again, etc. wasn’t impressed.
In the NYT polls of battleground Senate races the total number of people citing any foreign policy issue as a primary reason they were voting for someone was 3%. The centering of Israel in their narrative runs against everything that everyone believes how we are going to win the general. I don't think a single candidate we've interviewed this year has even brought it up. It's a voting issue for a very, very small number of people.
That’s right. The outstanding candidates profiled on Hopium did not raise issues—other than Trump or Trump adjacent (R) issues—outside their districts. El-Sayed may be counting on the 101K Dearborn “Uncommitted” vote from the 2024 Democratic primary to put him over the top. Unlikely. We’ll see.
Simon and friends... Exxon net profits Q2 hit $14.5 billion thanks to gas profits while fires
raged throughout Europe, Canada and all around the US. My state, California, has lost 3 towns
Pacific Palisades, Paradice and Altadena in the last few years. Yet our candidates, as far as I know,
just talk about gas prices and affordability which everyone knows about. And the "Dem Socialists"
think "defeating Israel (the Zionists!)" somehow is more important. I'll give them a REAL issue from the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS). Trump is closing or closed 57 of our 77 research centers
who predict and manage wildfires. What's going to be in our living room first? A fire or a ZIonist?
I respect your work, but it seems to me you are using the polls you like to do exactly what you are suggesting the El-Sayed campaign has done for different reasons. I wish we could just focus on the issues and let the voters choose. Do they think medicare for all is an idea whose time has come, or do they think it's a pipe dream and we should moderate our goals? Should we get big money out of politics, or is that unrealistic? etc. The voters in Michigan have a choice between two visions. I thought that was the healthy democracy that we're supposed to be defending. I'm ready to work hard for whoever wins, after the primary, which will come soon enough.
Kim, I am not cherry picking any polls. I just analyzed the data in front of us, which is consistent with a broad concern that many have about the ability of a far left candidate to win in the battleground. Given the stakes of the election these are reasonable things to discuss. We want to win here. Period. I am not also not happy about their flooding the zone with favorable polls, and what this means for elections in the future.
While I personally prefer Stevens to win on Tuesday, do we have faith that her camp in line with Whitmer, Slotkin, and others will go ‘all in’ should AES win on Tuesday, to help ensure he defeats Rogers? Peggie Dinghal made the overarching point that MI was a must keep and no matter who won, we should put aside all ‘politics’ to defend the incumbent seat 🤷🏻♂️🙏.
jonathan chait goes into a deep dive about how the dsa uses issues like mfa while obscuring their other, less popular ideas. while i would love to see mfa, it's not like it has proven to be something voters will crawl over broken glass to get, and moreover, we don't have to use that model for universal healthcare...countries like holland and switzerland do not, and still cover everyone. i think the aca could get us there. too many americans do not want to give up on their own private insurance, and don't like the idea of those "other people" getting "free healthcare.' we've been trying to get some sort of medicare system up and running since truman....and we don't get anywhere. that's why the aca was a big effin deal.....moreover, i see el sayed talking a lot about aipac, gaza, genocide etc then backtracking and saying well, gee whiz, i'd just be a senator from michigan and my job would be only to help michigan school children get enough to eat....which is actually a state issue, not a federal one. he posits money could go to michigan instead of israel. i do not think this is a winning message in a general election. it has me worried a bit. but i cannot vote there. so it is not up to me.
Sunday can be a day of renewal and forward thinking. I found this sixteen minute OpEd Video by Ezra Klein to be a worthwhile expression of forward looking hopeful thinking. What begins as commentary on Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey quickly expands to become a strong critique of the moral bankruptcy at the core of the MAGA movement and other right wing populist movements globally (including what Mr. Rosenberg refers to as “Greater MAGA”). This critique echos comments Mr. Rosenberg frequently makes regarding strength vs. weakness in right wing rhetoric. Mr. Klein ends with an articulation of a way forward in terms of renewal and regeneration of the values that make civil society civilized (including recognizing that the cruelty at the core of MAGA is weakness not strength). I found this vision very similar to the vision I hear Mr. Rosenberg articulate when he speaks of a new birth of freedom, at home and abroad.
I hope each of Messrs. Klein and Rosenberg are correct that the moment is at hand to seize this opportunity for renewal. Each of them notes, however, that such transformations do not happen spontaneously; they happen when good people of good will do the hard work to enable them. The hope for such better days ahead is what brought me to Hopium and what keeps me here.
Cheers to all!
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/02/opinion/christopher-nolan-odyssey-elon-musk.html?unlocked_article_code=1.2VA.CUe1.boa31Fd_Ioao&smid=nytcore-ios-share
Brian Tyler Cohen and Marc Elias speak about Accountability, for Piro, Blanche and others legal abusers particularly with their state bars in the wake of the kayak olympian's reflecting pool case being dropped.
https://youtu.be/myzQNX2kisM?si=Kc4_i8ZrJycSl_L0
Let's make "Accountability" a new watch word across the MagaSphere.
I looked it up and discovered MI has open primaries. I don't know if GOP voters could vote in both the GOP and DEM primaries, but I wonder if some of them might opt to vote for El-Sayed in the primary and then Rogers in the general election. I also wonder how the polling is done in a state with open primaries. I don't know anything about that.
I'm still concerned with the S(L)AVE Act. It looks like the parliamentarian has to take it out of the budget reconciliation. I hate that we are always balancing on the edge of a knife between a legitimate democratic republican and fascism without legitimate elections. I don't trust the GOP to not nuke the filibuster if Trump doesn't allow them to get anything done.
I will try to postcard out of this. Every little bit helps.
Simon, the pushback against your analysis in Michigan and Maine by Hopium members continues to be surprising to me. I found you because of you and Tom's insistence that there would be no "Red Wave" in 2022 - if I recall right, you two were the only election analysts calling it BS. That impressed me. And of course you were right! Your 35 year career in the politics business impresses me. I trust your conclusions and I've learned a lot from you. Why would I be a committed member of Hopium if I wanted to argue with you over polling of all things? Thank you for your non-biased analysis. It's been really helpful to me!