“Pollsters fear they’re blowing it again in 2022” is the Politico headline. The article starts off, “Since Donald Trump’s unexpected 2016 victory, pre-election polls have consistently understated support for Republican candidates, compared to the votes ultimately cast.” Setting aside the fact that midterms are a little harder for public opinion pollsters (which i differentiate from campaign pollsters because those i know of use the voter file) because of lower turnout there are a lot of factors — post-pandemic factors — that have altered the electoral terrain and are making it difficult for public opinion pollsters (again, which i differentiate from campaign pollsters).
Hope Springs from Field PAC volunteers knocked on 2,984,214 doors from March 5th to September 3rd this year in 8 crucial Senate Swing states with an Issues Survey that asked Democrats and Unaffiliated voters what they thought about candidates and issues. We talked with 230,305 voters this Spring and Summer and got 144,029 of them to answer answer questions from the survey. And we discovered some unusual patterns that probably are shocking — or at least confusing — pollsters this election cycle.
For example, Inflation or the Economy was the top response to the “most urgent issue” at this time question, and, yet, in almost every state we knocked on doors, Reproductive Rights was the most frequent issue that people said would determine how the vote this November.
Don’t ask me to explain this, because i can’t. And i’ve talked to voters (not just at their doors, but i connected with 10 voters each week to gauge the effectiveness of our canvass, volunteers and effort. And these conversations showed a bifurcated response in this regard. There is no question that voters thought that inflation was too high and the economy was too fragile for voters in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. But no one told me that the candidates on the ballot could do anything about it. And when voters talked to me about sending a message, the message they wanted to send in November was to “protect our freedoms,” “rights” and self-determination over their own bodies. This wasn’t just women in these 8 states. Lots of men expressed concern about the lapse of our fundamental right to privacy that was central to Roe v Wade.
I had unaffiliated voters tell me that they didn’t like what President Biden was doing, but they weren’t going to abandon their constitutional rights to send a message to Biden. And from that perspective, it is easy to conclude that this is the Dobbs election. But that’s not all.
But there was something else i would hear when i questioned voters who said that inflation was the most urgent issue but that Reproductive Rights would determine who they’d vote for in the midterms. “I can’t wait to vote,” was something i heard a lot since Kansas. Expectation that their vote was going to make a difference, and we can’t say that only has to do with the Dobbs decision. And while i heard a lot of “how can this have happened?” right after the Alito draft was leaked, after Kansas, that question wasn’t asked by the volunteers and voters i talked to. They had come to terms with their disappointment and were moving on to what they could do about it. In a sense, Republicans had made it easy for them, especially for the unaffiliated voters i talked to. I stopped hearing, “I vote for the best candidate,” and started hearing, “We’ve got to stop the madness.”
These aren’t the contrasts that public opinion pollsters were looking for. And Republicans have failed in their attempts at the Jedi mind trick. (I would note that the IPSOS tracking poll to the right tracks exactly what we found at the doors, and documented here on DKos.)
Republicans have been counting on voter disappointment with President Biden to set up the 2022 election. And while support (or approval) among Democratic voters has turned up sharply, Biden’s approval ratings aren’t what the vast plurality of voters who had a single issue that would determine how they vote were interested in.
Hope Springs from Field PAC has been knocking on doors, serve as a resource to Elections Committees in Black Churches and partnering with local civics and civil rights groups to raise awareness of the fact that Democrats care about our voters and are working to protect their rights. We are thinking about how to mitigate Voter Suppression efforts, get around them and make sure we have "super compliance," both informing and helping our voters meet the requirements and get out and vote.
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Hope Springs from Field PAC was started by former Obama Field Organizers because field was the cornerstone of our success. Election Protection was central to the Obama primary effort in 2008 because we were running against a party favorite with strong roots in state and local party organizations and we needed to appeal to voters outside that framework. We are returning to the old school basics: looking for patterns, addressing issues that have come up in the past and making sure authorities know about issues that are likely to (or even just may) come up in this election. Especially in light of True the Vote activities in majority minority areas.
Another factor that has to be making pollsters nervous is that we don’t know what Covid-19 has done to the electorate. Well, we do know, but the dramatic difference between Covid impact on Democrats and Republicans in these Senate Swing states cannot be overstated. Even for campaign pollsters, we just don’t know how the Covid-related deaths will effect the electorate because they aren’t automatically removed before November. Now there are always deaths between elections, but Covid had a unique way — in the end — of dealing death. The Kaiser Family Foundation tells us that “Unvaccinated Adults are Now More Than Three Times as Likely to Lean Republican than Democratic.” Deaths among the unvaccinated were more than four times as likely, according the the CDC. That’s a pretty substantial number, and public opinion pollsters have no way to account for that. This is a huge unknown factor going into November.
This is especially a factor (since pollsters, like generals, seem to always be “fighting” the last election) in how pollsters predict the makeup of the next election:
Because we can’t know in advance who is actually going to vote, pollsters develop models predicting who is going to vote and what the electorate will look like on Election Day. This is a notoriously difficult task, and small differences in assumptions can produce sizable differences in election predictions. We may find that the voters that pollsters were expecting, particularly in the Midwestern and Rust Belt states that so defied expectations, were not the ones that showed up. Because many traditional likely-voter models incorporate measures of enthusiasm into their calculus, 2016’s distinctly unenthused electorate – at least on the Democratic side – may have also wreaked some havoc with this aspect of measurement.
Pollsters’ livings depend on producing credible numbers that predict outcomes. And since 2016, Republicans have argued that after 2016 and 2020 the pollsters public opinion pollsters are missing key segments of the Trump coalition. As the Politico article referenced above, we have seen a “hardened Trump-backer nonresponse” to poll takers of all stripes (including those who identify themselves with the Fox News polls). And, given the Covid-related death disparity, some in Congress have argued that, “if anything, the polls may be showing a conservative bias right now.” We aren’t going to know until we get through a couple of election cycles. And no one wants to hear that.
But there are three more factors that should be making public opinion pollsters nervous. It’s not just the shape of the actual electorate (who turns out to vote in November), but also the battleground over which the election is being fought. Again, the work of Hope Springs from Field since the special elections in 2021 has been in shaping the upcoming electorate. We use three devices to do this (in addition to Voter Registration): the Issues Canvass, the Constituent Service Request form and the collection of Incident Reports.
But that’s on our side (the Good Guys). Republicans have been trying to shape the electoral battlefield, as well. They want to fight this election on terms of President Biden and worldwide Inflation. And, before Dobbs, they might have gotten away with that. Republicans wanted to make this election a Referendum on Biden.
But TFG wasn’t going to have that. The extreme narcissist has always wanted (needed) to be the center of attention. And it’s really hard to make 2022 a referendum on Biden when Trump has argued that he’s still president (pay attention to me!). And it’s not just his narcissism, but Trump has actively gotten involved in choosing GOP Candidates (especially for senate) that are tied to his unusual, indeed unbelievable claims of electoral victimhood. As the NYTimes wrote: “But now some are signaling concern that the referendum they anticipated on Mr. Biden — and the high inflation and gas prices that have bedeviled his administration — is being complicated by all-encompassing attention on the legal exposure of a different president: his predecessor, Donald J. Trump.”
In fact, the more that Donald Trump insists on getting media attention, the better for Democrats this Fall. “Let Trump be Trump!” because the one thing Trump does is piss off unaffiliated voters. So, for example, the more that Trump supporters pull out their Trump flags and fly them on their trucks around the Pittsburgh (or Milwaukee or Cleveland et al) suburbs, the more likely non-Democratic voters are going to side with us.
So, as the Trump effect favors Democrats, because it reduces the prospect of a referendum, over-exposes TFG (pissing off Democrats and Independents) and the fact that GOP primaries produced “weaker candidates who were endorsed by Mr. Trump.”
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Another assumption that Republicans have tried to convince pollsters and voters is that they have (as happens in Wave Elections) the advantage in Turnout and Voter Enthusiasm. Before the leak of the Alito draft on Dobbs, Republicans led Democrats in “voter enthusiasm” by 13 points. “The shrinking enthusiasm gap coincides with a bump President Biden is receiving in public approval polls.” Voters recognize that the legislative accomplishments of this president is a BFD.
And because of Biden’s rise, and Trump’s claims of victimhood, “Enthusiasm for upcoming midterms is at all-time high.” After 2018, that’s something. “Democrats appear just as eager to vote as Republicans, running counter to expectations that a weak economy would depress enthusiasm in the president's party.” And that includes young people. The Red Wave expectation was based upon that pre-Alito draft enthusiasm model, lower turnout and at least a split between Republican and Democratic candidates from unaffiliated voters who came out in the midterms. The latter is really hurting:
The Democratic gains come from increased support among independents, women and younger voters. Black and Hispanic voters, who have traditionally favored Democrats heavily, are also more solidly supportive of the party than they were earlier this year.
Before the Alito draft leak, Republicans had led independents “by 12 percentage points.” (Related aside: “In a separate question, voters cited the court ruling as the single issue most likely to make them vote this November, ahead of four other issues tested, including inflation, border security, gun violence and the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s search of former President Donald Trump’s Florida home.”)
And here’s the takeaway here: GOP enthusiasm isn’t as relevant to the final results in November as Democratic enthusiasm is, because the midterms has traditionally favored the party out of power. The change in on the Democratic side, and — combined with these other four factors — favors Democrats.
As i suggested at the beginning, the Reproductive Rights issue has dramatically changed this election because it has made those Democrats visceral voters. And visceral voters always vote. Republicans have had a decided advantage on this issue because they had the visceral voters — even though they were a small, devoted group. We found — at the doors — that this issue has turned those Democrats (and independents) into a larger, devoted group.
Finally, Voter Registration is shaping the electorate in a way that pollsters can’t predict. Democrats have long depended upon presidential campaigns to drive the major pushes in voter registration. But Covid-19 interrupted Democratic plans to vastly increase the number of registered voters for the next four years. A year ago, NBC found that Republican efforts in 2020 (and forward) had really shifted the electorate in their favor (except in Arizona and New Hampshire). And we have responded. Michelle Obama announced her 1 Million New Voters pledge, and Hope Springs has registered more than 100,000 voters in the 8 Senate Swing states in that effort.
More to the point, we have applied the old Obama guidance that “If you register them, you are responsible for them” turning out on Election Day. Doing this is one of our three main tasks for the last two months before November 8th.
But the post-Alito draft leak has shown that Democratic voter registration efforts are having a profound effect on shaping the electoral battlefield this Fall. Young women, in particular, are registering to vote at a significantly higher rate now. We are making up some of the ground we lost because of our (rational) Democratic response to Covid-19 that prioritized the safety of our voters and our volunteers.
So i have identified 5 reasons why pollsters are nervous and why Democrats should be feeling incredibly hopeful going into November:
- The Alito Dobbs opinion has altered the electoral landscape
- Covid-19 has disproportionately reduced the size of the GOP (and GOP-leaning) electorate
- Trump has made this election a Choice Election, instead of a Referendum on Biden
- Voter Enthusiasm is through the roof, and doesn’t favor the GOP, and
- Democrats have made up some of the ground in Voter Registration this year
In other words, this isn’t your father’s midterms. In fact, this year’s elections can’t be said to be similar to anything in memory. And Democrats have risen to the challenge this year, with its candidates, voters and organizations. Nothing guarantees a favorable outcome, but you have to like our chances. As long as we all get out and vote.
Hope Springs from Field PAC is trying to reinstitute best field practices, such as canvassing with people who look like the voters we are talking to and targeting former voters thrown off the rolls. But we have also want to adopt best practices we find “out in the wild,” like these first time voter parties. But because we study and teach field work as a profession, we bring in skillsets and tactics that may be new to the Democratic party regulars as well as activists in the area. But it is a two way street. That’s why it is so important to start developing Election Protection strategies now, and not wait until a couple of weeks or so before the general election. We have a lot of work to do. Can you help?
If you are able to support our efforts to protect Democratic voters, especially in minority communities, expand the electorate, and believe in grassroots efforts to increase voter participation and election protection, please donate:
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