For those who want to play the ratings game: WA-Sen is “Likely Democratic”, not “tossup”

Over the week­end, using a trove of sus­pect polls from Repub­li­can poll­sters as cov­er, Real­Clear­Pol­i­tics point­less­ly reclas­si­fied Wash­ing­ton State’s 2022 U.S. Sen­ate between Pat­ty Mur­ray and Tiffany Smi­ley as a “tossup,” break­ing ranks with every oth­er major fore­cast­er in the elec­tion pre­dic­tion and rat­ings racket.

Cur­rent rat­ings for U.S. Sen­ate in Wash­ing­ton State as tracked by Wikipedia contributors

Source	Rank­ing	As of
The Cook Polit­i­cal Report[36]	Like­ly D	Octo­ber 18, 2022
Inside Elec­tions[37]	Like­ly D	July 1, 2022
Saba­to’s Crys­tal Ball[38]	Like­ly D	Octo­ber 19, 2022
Politi­co[39]	Like­ly D	April 1, 2022
RCP[40]	Tossup	Octo­ber 30, 2022
Fox (FNC)[41]	Sol­id D	August 22, 2022
DDHQ[42]	Like­ly D	Sep­tem­ber 12, 2022
538[43]	Like­ly D	Octo­ber 19, 2022
The Econ­o­mist[44]	Like­ly D	Sep­tem­ber 7, 2022

The rat­ing change was prompt­ly seized upon by Tiffany Smi­ley’s cam­paign as fod­der for a fundrais­ing email, with fol­low­ers receiv­ing a mis­sive at 9:21 AM Pacif­ic today crow­ing: “Friend, my Sen­ate race is now a TOSS-UP!!! Every­one now is pay­ing atten­tion to this all-impor­tant race. I’ve been telling peo­ple for months that the peo­ple of Wash­ing­ton State are ready for a change. I knew in my gut that this could hap­pen, but every­one count­ed me out.”

Hilar­i­ous­ly, less than two hours before that, at 8:02 AM Pacif­ic, the oper­a­tives run­ning Smi­ley’s cam­paign had sent an email to the list com­plain­ing that Smi­ley’s cam­paign against Mur­ray keeps being “ignored” by the “main­stream media.”

So… which is it? Is “every­one” locked in and “pay­ing atten­tion” to this “all-impor­tant race,” or is Smi­ley still get­ting “ignored”? (It sure seems like dif­fer­ent oper­a­tives are pre­tend­ing to be Smi­ley simul­ta­ne­ous­ly these days…)

Smi­ley’s sil­ly emails aside, for any­one who’s won­der­ing if Real­Clear­Pol­i­tics is on to some­thing that every­one else is miss­ing, let me assure you that they’re not.

They’re sim­ply choos­ing to take a bunch of Repub­li­can-com­mis­sioned and Repub­li­can-polls seri­ous­ly, even though those Repub­li­cans polls are at odds with the cred­i­ble inde­pen­dent pub­lic opin­ion research that’s been done in this race.

Here’s a list of the recent cred­i­ble polls, all from dif­fer­ent poll­sters and sponsors:

• Crosscut/Elway: 13 point lead for Mur­ray. Mur­ray 50%, Smi­ley 37%. Field­ed Sep­tem­ber 12th-15th.
• KOMO4/Strategies 360: 12 point lead for Mur­ray. Mur­ray 52%, Smi­ley 40%. Field­ed Sep­tem­ber 22nd-26th.
• Emer­son Col­lege: 9 point lead for Mur­ray. Mur­ray 51%; Smi­ley 42%. Field­ed Sep­tem­ber 30th-Octo­ber 1st.
• Seat­tle Times/KING5/UW/WSU/SurveyUSA: 9 point lead for Mur­ray. Mur­ray 49%, Smi­ley 41%. Field­ed Octo­ber 14th-19th.
• Civiqs Ana­lyt­ics: 14 point lead for Mur­ray. Mur­ray 55%, Smi­ley 41%. Field­ed Octo­ber 15th-18th.
• NPI/Public Pol­i­cy Polling: 10 point lead for Mur­ray. Mur­ray 52%, Smi­ley 42%. Field­ed Octo­ber 19th-20th.

Pat­ty Mur­ray’s aver­age per­for­mance in these polls? 51.5%.

Tiffany Smi­ley’s aver­age per­for­mance in these polls? 40.5%.

Cru­cial­ly, Mur­ray is over fifty… the mag­ic number.

In Sen­ate polling going back sev­er­al years, no Demo­c­ra­t­ic U.S. Sen­ate or pres­i­den­tial can­di­date who polled over 50% in the body of cred­i­ble polling has lost accord­ing to an analy­sis by Change Research, anoth­er one of NPI’s pollsters.

Based on polling, this con­test is not a close race or a dead heat. This isn’t 2010, when a detect­ed lack of Demo­c­ra­t­ic enthu­si­asm sug­gest­ed trou­ble for Mur­ray. Per­haps that’s why Repub­li­can firms are putting out this garbage data. Repub­li­cans are not see­ing what they want to see, so they’re try­ing to manip­u­late media cov­er­age and fore­cast­ing to engi­neer a red wave narrative.

They’re not just doing it in Wash­ing­ton State, either. It’s a nation­wide thing. “There is a fero­cious cam­paign GOP cam­paign right now to flood the zone with their polls, game the aver­ages, declare the elec­tion is tip­ping to them,” observed Simon Rosen­berg over the week­end. “No ques­tion they could win but the ear­ly vote and polling this week do not con­firm this trend. Sorry. ”

We can’t know what is actu­al­ly hap­pen­ing right now in the elec­tion because no returns will be pub­lished until the evening of Novem­ber 8th.

No pun­dit, strate­gist, jour­nal­ist, or fore­cast­er knows the future. Polls can’t be used to pre­dict it, either. Even the best, most cred­i­ble polling is mere­ly sug­ges­tive. We can ana­lyze and dis­cuss prob­a­bil­i­ties, but not certainties.

The same goes for bal­lot return sta­tis­tics and oth­er data.

An appro­pri­ate cur­rent rat­ing for Wash­ing­ton’s 2022 U.S. Sen­ate con­test using the log­ic of the elec­tion pre­dic­tion and rat­ings rack­et is “Like­ly Demo­c­ra­t­ic” or some­thing sim­i­lar (Fox uses “Sol­id Demo­c­rat.”) Cred­i­ble polling indi­cates that a Pat­ty Mur­ray vic­to­ry is the most plau­si­ble out­come of this con­test. That was the case before Real­Clear­Pol­i­tics pro­nounced it a “tossup” and it’s the case now.

An hon­est and accu­rate rat­ing, how­ev­er, would be the same for every race: We Don’t Know Since We Don’t Pos­sess A Work­ing Crys­tal Ball — Sorry!