Keller @ Large: How independent women prevented a midterm "red wave"
BOSTON – Now that the dust has settled on the midterm elections, it's a good time to look back at what happened to the "red wave" that was projected by many pollsters.
David Paleologos is the head of Suffolk University's Political Research Center, considered one of the top pollsters in America.
Paleologos joined WBZ-TV political analyst Jon Keller to break down the midterm elections, and where the polls went wrong. Election Day was widely expected to bring a "red wave" of Republican victories.
Instead, Democrats maintained control of the Senate. While Republicans did take back control of the House, it was by a slimmer margin than anticipated.
Paleologos believes there are several reasons why the polls may have been wrong. He said there are a large number of new pollsters, and also more frequent polls that are influencing aggregate averages.
Paleologos said the sheer number of polls, many that lean Republican, brought repetition from state to state that outnumbered the polls that were completed by "traditional pollsters."
"But one has to wonder how so many new people have shown up in the poll world since Donald Trump, since 2016," he said. "We have pollsters who have just been doing polling for 3-4 cycles. And they did well when Donald Trump won in 2016, and pretty well even in 2020. But now in this midterm cycle we're being able to shake out the more traditional public pollsters from the newer pollsters."
Paleologos said in the weeks following the election, he has turned to the data to determine where things went wrong for Republicans. The pollster said Independent women broke from Independent men, which helped prevent a red wave.
So was the Supreme Court's ruling on Roe v. Wade a turning point in the election cycle?
"Absolutely," Paleologos said. "In our final national poll, among Independent men, the Supreme Court had basically an even approve-disapprove. But among Independent women, the Supreme Court was -20. … That one datapoint really guided our analysis for the different states."
Keller @ Large: Part 2
