Second Look at the Polls from Ohio

I’ve noticed a number of commentators starting to worry about a repeat of 2010, when a couple of bad Senate candidates seriously hurt the Republican Party. Some of the fear is focused on J. D. Vance in Ohio, including from our own Jim Geraghty. Vance won an especially contentious, and spendy, primary campaign earlier this year. But Jim looked at the polls and didn’t see Vance coasting the way a Republican should in Ohio. Jim worries that Vance is getting defined by Tim Ryan. Jim writes:

Since June, J. D. Vance has yet to lead a poll over Tim Ryan*, which is not what you would expect in such a seemingly red-leaning state. Whether we’re talking about big samples or small samples, registered voters or likely voters, Republican pollsters or Democratic pollsters, every pollster has found Ryan ahead so far, by anywhere from three to eleven percentage points.

Maybe the race is about to change; Vance and Republicans are about to launch a new ad campaign. (Ohio readers tell me they see Tim Ryan ads seemingly everywhere, but haven’t seen a Vance ad since the primary way back in May.) Last month, a Cincinnati radio talk-show host complained to the Daily Beast that Vance “is allegedly missing from many of the county fairs, party meetings, and campaign stops where candidates in this state are expected to be.”

There are a couple of things to note. The quality of the polls available on FiveThirtyEight for June is unusually low. The one “Republican poll” is run by John Bolton’s super PAC, a PAC that seems entirely dedicated to pushing one story about American politics if you look at its homepage:

I expect that if the polls can’t be made to tell this story in the future, this super PAC won’t be releasing them.

Jim writes that everyone in Ohio says they are getting blanketed with Tim Ryan’s ads. Well, if that’s true, it really stands out that a late-June Impact Research Poll (affiliated with the Ryan campaign) showed Ryan up 48–46 on Vance. A month later, another Impact Research Poll showed Ryan up 48–45 on Vance. The Ryan campaign is spending almost a million bucks a week, and then his campaign pollsters are telling us that these ads are doing bupkis for the candidate.

Where others see a repeat of 2010, I’m getting vibes of 2014, when Tom Cotton and Mark Pryor were shown to be neck-and-neck in the summer, only for Cotton to pull away and ride the fundamentals in the end to a massive 17-point victory. The same dynamic played out in Kansas and Iowa.

Full disclosure, as usual: Vance — whom I’ve never met — wrote a nice thing about my book, and, like me, has a beard.