The polling industry is right to fear the hidden GOP voter who only emerges from the mists on Election Day.
The polling industry is right to fear the hidden GOP voter who only emerges from the mists on Election Day.
E verywhere you look, the signs indicate that Democrats will have a great night on November 3.
Republican candidates in districts and states where Democrats should struggle are scrambling to distance themselves from their party’s unpopular president. Grudgingly, the president has had to steer clear of Republican candidates in competitive races. Instead, he’s energizing the GOP’s base voters in places like Alabama, Oklahoma, and Nebraska. The Republican Party’s national committees are pulling up stakes in states like Georgia and North Carolina — hardly dark-blue bastions — as they “triage” resources while Democrats expand their target list.
Then there are the polls. Reputable firms have started seeing a historic Democratic advantage in surveys that test voters’ preference for which party they’d like to see in control of Congress. In Iowa, Kansas, and South Carolina, the bottom is falling out for the GOP’s candidates. Electoral forecasters have been shifting close races toward Democrats for weeks, with no reciprocal movement in the GOP’s direction even in states and districts where Democratic primary voters nominated weak candidates.
All this suggests that a gigantic blue wave is about to break across the American political landscape. For some Democrats, it’s been a heady experience. “Is everything suddenly possible for Democrats?” the New York magazine headline read. In that dispatch, author Ed Kilgore explores a plausible scenario in which the party emerges from the election with a 47-seat gain in the House and a 54-seat Senate majority. Even if that high-end outcome isn’t the likeliest electoral result, he wrote, the “nature of states that could get caught up in this wave is becoming the stuff of Democratic dreams.”
This week, however, an irritating set of variables intruded upon these otherwise intoxicating circumstances. Suddenly, media outlets and pollsters alike have begun to manage the Democratic Party’s expectations.
Despite the party’s seemingly rational exuberance, NBC News analyst Natasha Korecki wrote Tuesday that Democrats “may need a gut check on their midterm ambitions.”
“We’ve all been here before. A poll-driven media cycle that paints a far rosier picture for one party (Republicans in 2022) or another (Democrats in 2024),” she wrote. While hungry Democratic eyes are drawn toward reach targets in the ruby-red Midwest, they have not yet sealed the deal in the states that will make or break the Democratic Senate majority: Alaska, Texas, Ohio, Maine, and even Michigan, where the party is defending its own turf.
Likewise, while polls suggest the Hispanic vote has flipped back to Democrats, “there are still big questions around whether they will turn out for the other side,” Korecki noted. The same could be said of the youth vote, which reliably leans left but is not so reliable when it comes to voting. Notoriously underrated undecided voters may still defer (or merely come home) to the GOP. And, in the contests that matter, Republicans have an “enormous spending advantage” over Democrats.
But what about those polls? Professionals in that space have long been frustrated by the rate at which Republican voters decline to participate in polls — a phenomenon that intensifies when the political environment is bad for their party. For example, in his latest Iowa survey — a state that has fooled pollsters before — State Navigate executive director Chaz Nuttycombe warned that the number of rural Iowans who “ignored” his survey is alarming.
“We think this could be a Canary in the Cornfields for Iowa polling this year,” he warned. “Will rural areas in Iowa swing 25-35 points leftward of 2024 in the non-IA GOV races?” Nuttycombe asked. “Yes? Polling is probably right. No? Probably not good for pollsters, Bob.”
The left-of-center pollster G. Elliott Morris issued a similar admonition on Tuesday to his fellow data analysts. While he did not rule out the possibility that this year’s polling error actually undercounts the Democratic Party’s strength (which is surely possible), “low-effort” poll respondents present a real conundrum. “And if this measure of effort is at all predictive of the voting behavior of people who don’t answer the polls (who can be thought to have an effort of zero), the polls could be off in terms of vote margin by up to 3.5 points favoring one party this November,” he wrote.
The New Republic’s Perry Bacon, too, has detected a whiff of euphoric irrationality among his co-partisans. The polls “simply seem too good to be true,” he wrote. He admits that he has no data to back up his apprehension, and that he has deferred to the prejudicial assumption that “too many voters in the South both love Trump and hate Black people” to hand Democrats a historic win. Admittedly, he’s playing down Democratic prospects for the benefit of his “mental health,” which will need all the help it can get. But Bacon has a point about the Democratic Party’s failure to manage the public’s expectations. And if the party falls short of a seismic victory, the press will conclude that Democrats turned off too many persuadable voters. That will be the correct takeaway, of course, but Bacon nevertheless reserves the right to resent it.
The polling industry is right to fear the hidden Republican voter who only emerges from the mists on Election Day. “There are many reasons the polls might ultimately be wrong in November, as many state polls were four years ago, but there’s no serious evidence that the polls are systematically missing Republican voters,” New York Times analyst Nate Cohn wrote in July 2020. Twelve months later, the American Association for Public Opinion Research explained why the polls missed so many Republican voters that year.
Of course, that was a presidential year defined by the outbreak of a socially destabilizing pandemic — hardly a reliable baseline to measure turnout in a relatively normal midterm election. But the scale of the GOP vote was also slightly underrated ahead of the 2022 midterm, too, even though, as Cohn noted, “Republicans failed to translate their strength into anything like a clear victory.” The same phenomenon marred the 2024 election. “The polls once again understated the depth of support for President-elect Donald Trump, despite the many changes pollsters made after their 2020 and 2016 misses,” NBC’s reporters sighed.
Things may be very different this year. Trump is no longer the force inside the GOP he once was, and a sizable portion of his 2024 voters seem to have soured on the president and his movement. The so-called fundamentals that shape the electoral environment are terrible for the GOP. No Republican should be comfortable staking the party’s prospects on an ill-defined but suspected polling error. It may all be, as the kids say, a cope.
Still, the missing Republican problem is real. The pollsters and journalists who warn of it are making admissions against interest. For that reason, they should be taken seriously.