Why would we not believe the polls?
You can believe polls. But polls are supposed to reflect shifts and trends that are occurring in the real world.
Well, in the “real world” we’re in a period of higher-than-average inflation, there’s a border crisis, the Middle East is burning, and Joe Biden is a doddering 82-year-old. The polls are a reflection of this reality; completely ignoring the polls so you can pretend your partisan spin narrative is actually reality is a Democrat cope.
Wow. Crisis at the border, insane inflation, the world on fire... and it's all the fault of the Democrat dementia patient sitting in the Oval Office.
I agree that what you listed above is alarming and would be a non-starter with voters. Surely there's no recent high-turnout election in which voters from a district that swung to the GOP 1.5 years ago just voted to send doddering Biden another Dem minion to blow up gas prices and continue the invasion at our border. Right? RIGHT?
Special and off-year elections are pretty inside baseball. Yes, Democrats have performed well in these, but it's not inconsistent with the polls. Polling from the
New York Times is able to replicate Democrats' strong performances in NY-03
while also showing Biden trailing Trump, for example*
And yes, 2022 was a good year for Democrats, one of the best midterms for the president's party in a long time. But those results were reasonably well-predicted by polls, which had Republicans favored in the House and the Senate being close.
That the polls have now
shifted to having Trump narrowly ahead is significant. It's the first time since 2004 that Democrats have consistently been down in the polls of a presidential race. Betting the election on a theory of skewed polls is denial-driven copium; a much smarter argument is that it's only March and the race between Trump and Biden still has a lot of time to develop.
*
I think the reality is that Trump is still more popular with the general electorate than your median GOP candidate for Congress, especially post-Dobbs. Of course this causes media-consuming liberals to short circuit.
