There are a lot of reasons to be skeptical of polling this year, and a new Washington Post survey out of Kansas just exposed one of the biggest.
Frankly, the polls have been very suspect throughout the Trump era. The most infamous miss belongs to Ann Seltzer, whose final 2024 Iowa poll had Kamala Harris ahead by three points. Trump carried the state by 13, which put the forecast off by a staggering 16 points. That poll destroyed her reputation and forced her into retirement.
I've been hesitant to jump on the bandwagon that the polls are deliberately skewed to suppress GOP turnout. Polling is an imperfect science, and I don't want to wave away every number simply because it looks good for Democrats. But it’s also undeniable that factors this cycle may be throwing the polls way off, and the Post just documented one of them as it happened.
The Post partnered with George Mason University's Schar School to survey the Senate race between Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) and Democrat challenger Adam Hamilton, one of the least-polled competitive Senate contests in the country. Scott Clement, the Post's polling director, explained what the team ran into once the calls went out.
After more than 85,000 phone calls and nearly 50,000 text messages, a potential problem emerged.
Democrats were far more enthusiastic about taking the poll than Republicans were. Registered Democrats were more than twice as likely as registered Republicans to complete the survey after answering an interviewer’s call — 32 percent versus 12 percent — with a similar partisan gap when texting voters to complete the survey online.
"This was a supersize version of a concern that has vexed pollsters for the last decade," Clement wrote.
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Mark Rozell, dean of George Mason's Schar School of Policy and Government, had his own theory about why Republicans stayed silent.
"The partisan enthusiasm gap likely explains the disconnect between Democratic and Republican willingness to respond… With an unpopular president, inflation, a war that Trump voters never asked for, the lack of GOP enthusiasm is not surprising," Rozell said.
He went further, wondering aloud about the mood on the right. "Are Republican voters this late in the election cycle feeling so down about their party's chances that they just don't want to talk about it?" Rozell asked.
That's one way to read it. I read it very differently.
We’ve seen polls underestimate the support of Trump and Republicans before, even at the height of MAGA enthusiasm. We know how leftists let politics dictate every aspect of their lives, while Republicans tend to care more about living their lives than going out and spending hours a day protesting — or taking time away from things that matter to respond to a poll.
Republicans who hang up on a pollster aren't necessarily demoralized. They may simply have more important things to do, or perhaps they're distrustful of the pollster. And it’s not like they have no reason to be.
The pollsters have chased down thousands of additional Republican voters to balance the sample. Clement admitted even that may not have been enough. "It's possible those efforts fell short," he added.
This pattern goes well beyond Kansas. As PJ Media previously reported, CNN anchor Boris Sanchez asked pollster Frank Luntz last week whether surveys under-sample the less-engaged voters Trump tends to turn out. Luntz, who has warned Democrats against complacency heading into the midterms, didn't hesitate.
"We know that they don't respond to phone calls," Luntz told CNN. "We know that in the exit polling back in 2016, and I say this publicly because I want people to hear this — you know, I teach at West Point. I cannot lie, cheat, or steal. The cadets can't. I can't. — I got 2016 wrong. I believed in the exit polls. Trump voters walked away, refused to participate because they thought that it was against them."
I’m not going to tell you that the polls are all definitely wrong. Could they be? Sure. There’s plenty of reason to believe this year will feature another heaping pile of lousy polls that grossly underestimated Republican support. If that’s the case, we’ll know the reason why.