Photo credit: AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite

Unlike the plethora of generic polls which bounce all over the place yet purport to conclusively identify which party Americans prefer for Congress, this "bipartisan" poll focuses solely on 56 U.S. House battleground districts which are likely to have close elections in November. While it's true that all 435 seats in the House are up for election in November, very few of those 435 are actually competitive and these 56 are judged to be the primary ones which could go either way.

Because the poll was sponsored by AARP (don't worry: it's still a reasonably fair poll despite the left-wing politics of the sponsor), they oversampled voters 50 years of age and over. The results show a 4-point lead for Republicans in these key districts. The oversampling in this case means that 61% of respondents were age 50 or older, which is out of line with the 2020 election's age breakdown -- but not by all that much.

In 2020, 60% of the electorate was age 45 (not 50) or older, but it's possible that if the AARP poll's sample had matched 2020 the results would be even better for the GOP, if voters in their 40's were the ones undersampled here. Voters who are 40+ have generally achieved the age of intellectual and emotional adulthood ("40 is the new 20") and tend to have jobs, families and other real-world responsibilities, more so than voters under 40. As such, these voters likely swing more to the right than the left and therefore would lead to a greater margin for Republicans in this particular poll.