Is it too early for 2024 polls to be predictive?

$%*& yes! But they can tell us about public opinion today.

Dear reader,

You would be forgiven for not knowing there are elections, today, in November of the year of our lord 2023, given our collective early focus on 2024. You’d also be forgiven for that focus on next year; It’s an important contest, with a significant outcome at stake, and since it’s November it’s a suitable time to check in with how the race is starting out.

That’s what I’ve done for ABC News/538 this morning. According to our averages of the early polls, Democrats and Republicans are tied in the popular vote for both the US House of Representatives and the presidency. Democrats are polling at 44% in the generic ballot for the House, while Republicans are at 43%. And Biden and Trump are tied at 42% and 43%, respectively, for the White House.

These averages are more reliable than taking any one poll as gospel, but it’s important to remember that polls can be uniformly biased by several different sources of error and bias. For example, in a poll this weekend from the New York Times and Siena College, Biden is essentially tied with young voters. Early polls even had the president losing with the group. That’s far off from the 24-point margin Biden won young people by in 2020 and his 30 point-margin in 2022 (both according to Catalist). In fact, the swing in margin among this group — 20 to 30 points to the right, depending on the poll you look at — is so large that it accounts for about half of the overall swing in the electorate in these surveys. So the question I posed to readers on social media last week is: Do you really buy that? In 2022, disaffected young voters “came home” to Biden after being frustrated with his age and politics. Do you have a good reason to believe 2024 will be different?

I also touch on the huge caveat to this polling, regardless of how representative it is: Polls are not predictive — at all,  frankly — this early before an election. There is some evidence that early polls have gotten more predictive as polarization has increased, but it’s not robust enough to offer a conclusion for the future:

And finally, if you are looking at early polls, it’s important to remember that the national popular vote and Electoral College outcomes are likely to diverge. So we did some simulations of the election to see how much they might differ, and which party would be favored depending on the EC gap and popular vote result. Click through to the article to see those results.

The 2023 election

Tonight’s 2023 elections will provide even more data with which you can update your priors about 2024. But they are also important in their own right. ABC/538 will have coverage of elections for governor in Kentucky and Mississippi, for the state legislature in Virginia, for a US House seat in Rhode Island, for mayors in Philly, Houston and Bridgeport, and for the legal marijuana and abortion referendums in Ohio. The outcomes of these races will have tangible consequences for millions of Americans. It's our responsibility to engage with them actively (if not always enthusiastically).

Thanks for reading,

Elliott