With the first few primary elections behind us and Super Tuesday less than a week away, there's been a trend developing: polling that shows consistent strengths for former President Donald Trump, only to have him underperform in the actual elections.
And polling that consistently shows weakness for President Joe Biden, only to have him overperform at the ballot box.
Jon McHenry, Vice President of North Star Opinion Research, told KNX News’ Chris Sedens that Nikki Haley has been fighting hard to shore up support in states with early primaries. But part of the disconnect also has to do with who’s actually showing up to vote.
“Donald Trump, also, because he does have these large leads, I think some of his supporters see less of a need to go out and vote for him, figuring, ‘well, he's up by 30 points, why do I need to go?’” McHenry said.
On the other side, despite Biden’s low approval rating and poor polling in a match-up against Trump, he’s not the main factor driving many Democratic voters to the polls.
“In some of these special elections, you're seeing an issue like abortion in the New York special election really dominate the conversation, where Joe Biden has much less of a role to play in that,” McHenry said. “There's not as much voting against Joe Biden in these special elections as what we might see in the fall.”
Another issue is the difficulty of conducting accurate polling, which is more expensive and labor-intensive than it used to be. McHenry said to keep an eye out for polls where the sample doesn’t match up with the demographics of the electorate.
“For any consumer polls out there, you really want to see, okay, are these people that I can trust?” he said. “Are they people who are taking it seriously and spending the money and time to get it right, as opposed to even some of the media polls that we see out there are just, you know, either they’re online and not particularly good samples, or they’re a less intensive methodology.”
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Election results in Michigan also revealed a startling gap in turnout between the two parties, with nearly 40% more people voting in the Republican primary than in the Democratic contest. Axios reported that the results in November may depend on which voters have the enthusiasm to go to the polls.
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