Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said that Democrats would hold the Senate and potentially add seats in the 2022 midterms.
In an interview with the Associated Press Thursday, Schumer said he was bullish on the Democrats’ prospects for the midterms. Schumer claimed that Democrats had overcome the pre-summer electoral environment and were closing the gap in key swing states, citing the fact that Democrats have branded their Republican opponents as extreme while touting their own accomplishments.
“It’s tight,” Schumer told the AP. “I believe Democrats will hold the Senate and maybe even pick up seats.”
Schumer was cautious about races in several battleground states, but said that Democrats were within striking distance of Republicans.
“I don’t want to give the illusion that these are all slam dunks,” Schumer said, but “[t]he fact that we’re in the ballpark and our Democratic candidates are defying the political environment is a testament to a few things,” he said. “[Voters] are seeing how extreme these Republican candidates are and they don’t like it. And second, they’re seeing the Democrats are talking to them on issues they care about, and that we’ve accomplished a great deal on things.”
Legacy media journalists and Democratic activists have attacked polling in recent days, spinning a narrative that Republicans are inundating the public with polls favoring Republicans to spin their own narrative of a coming red wave.
“If you get past those headlines and dig a little deeper, you would uncover an insidious and seemingly intentional campaign from Republican-backed polling firms to flood the zone and tip the balance of polling averages in favor of their candidates, to create a narrative that Republicans are surging and that a red wave is imminent and inevitable,” MSNBC host Joy Reid said in a monologue on her show “The ReidOut” Monday.
“Most of the polling over the last few weeks is coming from partisan outfits — usually Republican — or auto-dial firms,” New York Times pollster Nate Cohn claimed in an editorial touting his own polling. “These polls are cheap enough to flood the zone, and many of them were emboldened by the 2020 election, when their final results came close to the election results even as other pollsters struggled.”
Journalists lit up Twitter on Monday evening after The New York Times and Siena College released a spate of polls showing Democrats in the lead in four hotly-contested Senate races. The journalists seized on the polls in an effort to debunk a “narrative” that Republicans’ lead in recent generic ballot polling would help carry Republicans in Arizona, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Georgia across the finish line.
The polls, conducted by NYT/Siena, found that Democrats led in Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Georgia. In Arizona, incumbent Democrat Mark Kelly held a six-point lead over Republican Blake Masters, 51%-45%; in Georgia, incumbent Democrat Raphael Warnock held a three-point lead over Republican challenger Herschel Walker, 49%-46%; in Pennsylvania, Democrat John Fetterman led Republican Dr. Mehmet Oz by five points, 49%-44%. The Senate race in Nevada between incumbent Democrat Catherine Cortez Masto and Republican challenger Adam Laxalt was tied at 47%.
“Many partisan ‘outlier’ polls funded by GOP are driving the narrative,” Politico investigative reporter Heidi Przybyla commented on the polling. “Nonpartisan polls find these races are very close.”
“These encouraging Senate polls confirm that the red wave narrative was bull***, again,” Democratic activist Simon Rosenberg commented. “It’s a close, competitive election and the Senate is leaning Dem.”