A question for Nate Cohn at the New York Times regarding a claim about adjusting polls using recalled past vote

A colleague writes:

Have you seen this article by Nate Cohn at the New York Times?

A few things in it seemed weird. For one, he writes:

The tendency for recall vote to overstate the winner of the last election means that weighting on recall vote has a predictable effect: It increases support for the party that lost the last election.

Is this always true? I think I have some small algebraic examples where it is not. Furthermore, his table here seems to contradict that?

I was curious so I sent the following message to Nate Cohn:

A colleague pointed me to an article of yours and had a question; see below. Did you make a mistake in your article? Also, on the general topic of the benefit of adjusting for party identification, I recommend these articles: from 2001: http://stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/published/aprvlRv1.pdf from 2016: http://stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/published/swingers.pdf from 2016: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/09/20/upshot/the-error-the-polling-world-rarely-talks-about.html from 2016: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2016/08/dont-be-fooled-by-clinton-trump-polling-bounces.html

No reply! I have a horrible feeling that my message had too many links and it got caught in his spam filter. So maybe blogging this is the best way to communicate it.

Anyway, I haven’t looked into this particular question of adjusting for past vote; there could well be subtleties here of which I’m unaware. In general, I think that it’s a good idea to adjust for some measure of partisanship (recall Lohr and Brick’s reanalysis of the famous Literary Digest poll from 1936), whether that be party identification, party registration, or recalled past vote, because we do have relevant information on these variables at the state level. But, yeah, these measures themselves have errors, so the best adjustment will not be a simple “weighting.” P.S. My colleague adds this explainer: