According to Tom Bevan’s post at RealClearPolitics only one major pollster got both the results of the 2016 presidential and the Florida midterms right—Robert Cahaly, senior strategist for the Trafalgar Group:
Cahaly managed to pick up support for Trump that all other pollsters missed by employing a unique method that sought to measure support from voters who’d been “inactive†in recent election cycles, as well as adding a question to his surveys designed to isolate the effect of social desirability bias among Trump voters – the concept that people won’t tell pollsters their true intentions for fear of being stigmatized or being politically incorrect.
After asking voters who they were supporting in 2016, the pollster followed up by asking them who they thought their neighbors were supporting, Trump or Clinton. Cahaly consistently found a high degree of variance between who respondents said they were voting for and who they thought their neighbors were voting for, suggesting there was in fact a “shy Trump effect†at play.
Two years later, Cahaly’s method once again proved solid. In one of the most polled races of the cycle, Trafalgar stood alone as the only polling firm to correctly show a Ron DeSantis gubernatorial victory in Florida – as well as Rick Scott winning the Senate race there. (Both narrow outcomes will likely result in recounts.)
I think it’s only going to get tougher from here on out.
BTW I wanted to touch on my thoughts about voter fraud. I was a judge of election for 25 years. Not only have I seen actual attempted voter fraud, I can see the opportunities for fraud. Those who scoff at voter fraud are generally being highly specific. They’re talking about voters walking into a polling place and casting a vote by pretending they’re someone they aren’t. I agree that’s pretty rare. It’s just too easy to detect. As an election judge I have personally turned people away for just this reason. Under present law I would probably be required to issue them provisional ballots.
But there are other types of fraud. There’s voter fraud perpetrated by the election staff at a voting place. I believe that any polling place that hasn’t finished tabulating the votes three hours after the polls have closed is probably engaging that sort of voter fraud. Tabulation doesn’t take time but manufacturing votes does and it’s pathetically easy though tedious to do. I haven’t seen or done this because I run a taut ship but I know enough to see how it could be done by people less scrupulous than I.
There are also non-citizens who claim the right to vote fraudulently. When they’re detected at the polling place, they may be issued provisional ballots. They’re still fraudulent and there’s practically no way of detecting it. I believe I have seen this, also, as a judge of election.
Another species is voter fraud is perpetrated by voters who are registered multiple times in different jurisidictions and who vote multiple times, either absentee or in person. I think there are millions of such voters, particularly in Florida.
Yet another variety of voter fraud is at the wholesale level, perpetrated by election officials manufacturing ballots in mass quantities. There’s plenty of reason to suspect that’s what’s going on in Broward County. What else is one to think when boxes of ballots show up for the first time days after the election? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
Our system depends on trust and as trust is eroded through misfeasance, malfeasance, or nonfeasance it becomes unworkable.
I am not sure why voter fraud is even a controversial topic. There is almost none of the kind of voter fraud that would be stopped by an ID, but there is quite a bit of what you describe. It has been found over and over, and you didn’t even mention the absentee ballot fraud. Yet, efforts are concentrated solely on voter ID. I think that tells us that they aren’t really concerned about fraud, but something else.
Steve