The people over at MSNBC are so excited for the promised “blue wave” in the midterm elections that they've started the celebration early. As panelists on Morning Joe discussed the upcoming special election in Pennsylvania’s eighteenth district, the show ran a graphic and chyron citing the only poll to date to have Democrat candidate Conor Lamb in the lead.
Host Joe Scarborough mentioned the election as a possible motive for President Trump’s recently announced plans for tariffs on steel and aluminum. While most panelists agreed that the election had at least factored into the President’s reasoning, MSNBC contributor Kasie Hunt insisted that it would change nothing in Pennsylvania:
I think to a certain extent whatever the President may be doing here that has to do with PA 18 has to be a Hail Mary. Everybody I’m talking to thinks the Republicans are going to lose the race at this point. The NRCC just dumped over half a million dollars, they’ve spent millions trying to prop up their candidate.
“I think the tide is really turning,” she concluded. As if on cue, a graphic showing the poll in question appeared on screen. “Wow!” Scarborough exclaimed. “Look at the Emerson College poll! Conner Lamb, 48%; Rick Saccone, 45%.” He and Hunt both emphasized that the election was taking place in a district which had swung in Trump’s favor by around twenty percent in 2016.
He later hedged his bet, claiming that even if “Republicans only win by one or two points,” such a result would still indicate of a “massive underperformance by the GOP in 2018.”
Unlike Hunt, Scarborough wisely avoided predicting an outcome. While polls can be a useful tool for obtaining a rough estimate of voter sentiments, they lack the degree of predictive certitude which many project onto them. But whatever the eventual outcome may be in Pennsylvania, MSNBC’s choice to run the only poll with the findings that they liked is undeniably dishonest.
Emerson conducted their poll from the first through the third of March. To date, it is one of five polls of the district to have come out since the beginning of 2018. While Gravis’s January poll showing Republican candidate Rick Saccone ahead by twelve points is an outlier, all subsequent polls (with the exception of Emerson) have found him to be leading by somewhere between three and six points.
Defenders of Morning Joe will likely point to the recency of the Emerson study, but a poll conducted during the first five days of March still has Saccone up by three points. Additionally, this poll by Gravis used a sample size that was nearly twice as large as Emerson’s, as well as a smaller margin of error.
