538: Why Early Senate And Governor Polls Have Plenty To Tell Us About November
According to a recent survey from Blueprint Polling, Republican Herschel Walker is leading Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock 49 percent to 45 percent in Georgia’s 2022 Senate race. According to another from Emerson College/The Hill/Nexstar, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, leads Democratic challenger Beto O’Rourke 52 percent to 45 percent. And according to yet another from John Zogby Strategies/EMI Research Solutions/Unite NY, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, has 14-to-19-point leads over an array of possible Republican opponents.
These are surely good signs for Walker, Abbott and Hochul … or are they?
These polls, like all the others you’ve seen of the 2022 general election so far, were conducted seven months or more before the general election. This means that there is still plenty of time for the trajectory of a race to change — whether due to news events, campaign strategy or shifts in the national environment. But while these polls are still from very early in the election cycle, they’re already pretty useful at this stage — you just have to bear in mind that, like all polls, they come with a margin of error.
That’s according to our analysis of general election polls for Senate and governor conducted in the first six months of every election year going back to 1998. Using over 2,000 polls, we built polling averages for 261 Senate races and 225 gubernatorial contests that had at least one survey in the first six months, finding that these polls have a fairly strong relationship to the final results in November, as the chart below shows.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-early-senate-and-governor-polls-have-plenty-to-tell-us-about-november/
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