One of the nation’s more accurate pollsters is bullish on Sen. Kelly Loeffler’s chances to win her runoff race against Raphael Warnock but less confident that Sen. David Perdue will best Jon Ossoff.
“We see the Warnock-Loeffler race as one that will be less close. We feel more confident that Loeffler is going to probably prevail,” Robert Cahaly, the chief pollster for the Trafalgar Group, told the Washington Examiner. “We feel more confident that the other one is going to be closer.”
Trafalgar’s most recent polls in Georgia show two different races developing, with Loeffler leading Warnock by almost 7 points, 52.2%-45.5%. Meanwhile, Perdue is holding an under 3-point lead over Ossoff, 50.2%-47.5%.
Cahaly believes one big reason for the difference is that Warnock is constantly in the media for his previous sermons, many of which have been painted as out of the mainstream for Georgia voters.
“They’re driving him crazy with bits and pieces of his sermons,” Cahaly said. “You watch the 11 o’clock news, and you’ve almost got your fill of television evangelism.”
Some of Warnock’s past sermons have continued to follow him through the campaign, including one 2011 sermon in which he paraphrased Matthew 6:24 to claim that “nobody can serve God and the military.”
“America, nobody can serve God and the military,” Warnock said at the time. “You can’t serve God and money. You cannot serve God and mammon at the same time. America, choose ye this day who you will serve. Choose ye this day.”
Despite one of the races being closer, both Republican incumbents enjoy a lead in the most recent Trafalgar poll. Cahaly has what is perhaps a surprising explanation for that, saying that the two GOP candidates did themselves a big favor by coming out in support of Atlanta’s Major League Baseball club’s nickname.
The Atlanta Braves have mostly escaped the attention of critics of Native American nicknames. However, with bigger targets such as the Washington Redskins and Cleveland Indians deciding to change their names, it’s possible the Braves could be the next target.
“There’s a lot of interest in the fact that Perdue and Loeffler, within hours of the announcement from Cleveland, came out and insisted on their support for the Braves remaining the Braves,” Cahaly said. “Look at social media — there is a ton of attention on that issue.”
Cahaly said that Warnock and Ossoff are under “a lot of pressure” to reveal where they stand on the issue, having yet to make their positions clear.
“We know that north of 73% of people in Georgia don’t want to see the name changed,” Cahaly said, adding that voters are wondering “why won’t” Warnock and Ossoff “take a stand” on the issue.
The Georgia runoff elections leave Trafalgar in a familiar place, an outlier among the rest of the polling industry. According to a FiveThirtyEight analysis of polling in the runoff races, Loeffler’s lead of almost 7 points in the most recent Trafalgar poll is a larger lead than in any of the other available polls. FiveThirtyEight’s average of all polls actually shows Warnock with a slim 48.8%-48.3% advantage, or half a point.
This reality isn’t new to Cahaly and Trafalgar, having faced ridicule for being alone in their assessment of a race but having also called winners correctly. Trafalgar was the only polling firm to predict President Trump’s 2016 victories in Michigan and Pennsylvania, with Cahaly even correctly predicting the exact number of electoral votes Trump would win. Trafalgar did the same thing in 2018, becoming the only polling operation correctly predicting victory for Gov. Ron DeSantis in Florida.
This year’s cycle has been no different, with Trafalgar correctly showing a tight race between Trump and then-challenger Joe Biden, while many other pollsters saw the race as a blowout.
When it comes to the Georgia runoff races, Cahaly believes they are more accurate again because they are controlling for voters pollsters have been unable to reach.
“We recognize that there is 3.7% of the vote in Georgia that we don’t know how to find them,” Cahaly said. “We don’t know how to contact them, we don’t have a phone number, we don’t have an email, we don’t have anything.”
But Cahaly pointed out that these people have “voted twice,” and Trafalgar is “assuming they’re going to vote again” and “vote the way they did vote” in previous cycles.
The pollster said that Trafalgar has weighted its model to account for these hidden voters.
“When I realized there’s roughly 185,000 voters that I cannot find a way to contact … I don’t want them to be underrepresented,” Cahaly said.
Georgia’s runoff elections have been under a national microscope, with their outcomes set to decide which party will control the U.S. Senate when a new Congress convenes in January.
Republicans currently hold a 50-48 edge in the Senate, needing just Loeffler or Perdue to prevail in order to keep hold of their slim majority.
