Polls and graphs

In light of their miserable failure to predict the 2016 election, do I dare cite blog 538′s compilation of polls regarding the midterm elections?

The gender gap — the fact that women tend to vote Democratic at a higher rate than men do — has been a persistent feature of American politics, and it’s only getting wider. According to 2016 exit polls, women voted for Hillary Clinton by 13 percentage points, and men voted for President Trump by 11 points. That 24-point gap in the national popular vote was the biggest in the history of the presidential exit poll.

This week, we got a poll showing that same 24-point gender gap in the only “national” election of 2018: the national popular vote for the U.S. House. A YouGov survey found that male voters preferred the Republican candidate by 9 percentage points, while female voters preferred the Democratic candidate by 15 points. It was a bit of an outlier, but not egregiously so: A RealClearPolitics-style average1 of generic-ballot polls taken in the past two weeks reveals a gender gap of 16 points, and the two highest-quality polls from that period — Quinnipiac and Marist — each showed a gap even bigger than 24 points.

…Democrats are currently ahead in polls of the generic congressional ballot by 7.1 percentage points (47.4 percent to 40.3 percent), according to FiveThirtyEight’s updating average. At this time last week, Team Blue was ahead by 8.2 points: 48.1 percent to 39.9 percent. The numbers one month ago were more like today’s: Democrats 47.4 percent, Republicans 40.0 percent, which translated to a 7.4-point lead.

Read more here and view some interesting graphs.