One of this year’s most accurate pollsters believes that last-minute changes to election laws had a significant effect on the results of the presidential election.
“If this election had been run based on the rules of 2016, it would have come out differently,” Robert Cahaly, the chief pollster for the Trafalgar Group, told the Washington Examiner. “I think those little changes made a tremendous difference.”
Prior to November’s election, at least 30 states and Washington, D.C., made changes to election rules that made casting mail-in ballots easier. Citing concerns over the coronavirus pandemic, states eased the requirements to vote absentee and allowed ballot drop box locations, while some states proactively sent voters absentee ballot applications or even the ballots themselves.
Other changes included lifting requirements that voters have witnesses sign their absentee ballots, with Rhode Island and Minnesota doing away with the rule. North Carolina required only one signature instead of the usual two.
Perhaps most controversially, battleground states that helped push President Trump to victory in 2016, such as Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, made changes to extend the deadline that ballots had to be received or postmarked. Those changes led to late counting that saw early Trump leads evaporate as late-arriving ballots were counted well into the next few days.
Cahaly believes that such rule changes open the door to fraud, but he didn’t say fraud was what cost the president reelection.
“Pennsylvania had voter fraud in 2020. Pennsylvania had voter fraud in 2018,” Cahaly said, adding that Pennsylvania has had voter fraud “as far back” as he can remember.
“Philadelphia has an inherent problem with the system,” he continued. “Did these rule changes make [potential fraud] more likely? I don’t think there’s any question they did.”
Trafalgar’s final Pennsylvania presidential poll showed Trump with a slim lead of fewer than 2 percentage points over then-candidate Joe Biden, but Biden ended up winning the state by 1.2 points. In the lead-up to the election, Cahaly warned that Trump’s lead would have to be closer to 4-5 points to prevail in the state. Otherwise, changes to the rules could turn a Trump victory into a Trump defeat.
Cahaly told the Washington Examiner that he always felt that the “only way” Trump was going to win Pennsylvania was if every vote had a “legit postmark” and a “verified signature,” something he said “did not happen.”
But Cahaly also expressed frustration with Republicans who complained about fraud costing the president reelection, noting that fraud has “always been there.” Instead, Cahaly said Republicans should have been more aggressive in fighting the rule changes before the election took place.
“It’s like being mad there was a designated hitter this year,” Cahaly said. “There’s no question it made a difference, but it’s a difference everyone saw coming. You can only cry wolf so much.”
Cahaly said it’s “easy to complain about the rules after the game’s over, but the question is, what did you do to prevent it?”
He added, “If you think what was done wasn’t legit, you’ve got two years to figure it out.”
Cahaly said voter integrity will remain a “huge issue” in “every single red state and quite a few of the purple ones.”
“If I was a Republican attorney general … I would spend the next two years talking about voter integrity and trying to get the laws changed,” he said. “I think Republicans want to see voter integrity be a big issue.”
Cahaly’s Trafalgar Group has earned a reputation for accuracy during the last three election cycles. Trafalgar was the only polling outfit to call Michigan and Pennsylvania correctly for Trump in 2016, even predicting his exact electoral vote count. That success continued in 2018, with Trafalgar being the only pollster to predict a victory for Gov. Ron DeSantis in Florida correctly.
This year’s election cycle saw more of the same, with Trafalgar being one of the few pollsters showing a tight race between Trump and Biden. Nowhere was the disconnect between Trafalgar and other pollsters more obvious than Wisconsin, where Trafalgar’s final poll showed Biden winning by 1 point. More well-known pollsters, such as the New York Times/Siena College and ABC News/Washington Post polls, had Biden leading by 11 points and 17 points, respectively. Biden ended up carrying the state by less than 1 point.
Internal data provided to the Washington Examiner by Trafalgar showed the pollster with a 91.2% five-year correct election call rating.
Cahaly provided a glimpse of where Republicans might be leaning in 2024. Asked by the Washington Examiner if there was an early front-runner to be at the top of the ticket in the post-Trump era, Cahaly came up with a surprising name.
“Amazingly, the few times we’ve polled that, the name that keeps coming up first … Tucker Carlson,” Cahaly said. “We polled that three times, and every time his name is on the list, he comes in first.”
While Carlson, the host of Fox News’s Tucker Carlson Tonight, has gotten the most mentions so far, other early popular candidates are Sens. Tim Scott, Ben Sasse, and Josh Hawley.
Cahaly said Trafalgar will begin digging deeper into that race after the Georgia Senate runoff elections in January are complete. For now, he’ll stay focused on calling two more 2020 races.
