Georgia gubernatorial candidate Brian Kemp now has a 12-point lead on his Democratic opponent, Stacey Abrams, according to a survey published this weekend by the polling firm Trafalgar Group.
Compared to all the other polls, this one looks nuts. Or could it be a sign of a much bigger problem for the Democratic Party, and not just because of what the survey says about Georgia?
Prior to the release of the Trafalgar poll, which surveyed 2,200 likely voters in the Peach State, all other firms showed Kemp and Abrams within 2 or 3 points of each other. Trafalgar is the only firm showing the Republican in the Georgia gubernatorial race blowing the Democrat out of the water. Either this poll is just plain wrong or they’ve again outsmarted the competition and the conventional wisdom that says Democrats will reap a big political payday on Nov. 6.
Trafalgar has the distinction of being one of the only organizations to call the 2016 presidential election accurately, even as basically every other firm called them crazy. They called Pennsylvania, Florida, Michigan, and North Carolina for President Trump when so many other pollsters showed Hillary Clinton winning. More importantly, Trafalgar predicted in the afternoon of Election Day 2016 that Trump would win the Electoral College with 306 votes, which was right on the nose.
Trafalgar’s success in 2016 can be attributed to the fact that it grappled successfully with the “shy” or “hidden” voter phenomenon, where respondents would mislead or otherwise avoid giving pollsters straight answers regarding how they intended to cast their vote. As it turns out, if virtually every news and pop media outlet relentlessly beats the drum against a candidate or party as a bunch of racist yokels, this social pressure has an effect. It doesn’t cause people to change their vote necessarily, but it causes voters who are polled to be less willing to admit who they are voting for.
As a workaround to the “hidden” voter problem, Trafalgar discovered that their numbers looked much different — and were ultimately more accurate — when it asked respondents to answer a simple question about their neighbors. “I grew up in the South and everybody is very polite down here, and if you want to find out the truth on a hot topic, you can’t just ask the question directly,” Trafalgar senior strategist Robert Cahaly told Politico in 2016. “So, the neighbor is part of the mechanism to get that real answer.”
He added, “In the 11 battle ground states, and 3 nonbattleground, there was a significant drop-off between the ballot test question [which candidate you support] and the neighbors’ question [which candidate you believe most of your neighbors support]. The neighbors question result showed a similar result in each state: Hillary dropped [relative to the ballot test question] and Trump went up across every demographic. Hillary’s drop was between 3 and 11 percent, while Trump’s increase was between 3 and 7 percent.”
This pattern “was a constant” regardless of whether they were polling in Pennsylvania, Nevada, Utah, or Georgia, Cahaly said.
So, what does that mean? I’m not going to be so bold as to predict how Tuesday will shake out, but Trafalgar’s Georgia survey is worth taking seriously in that context.
If this group is seeing something in the Georgia gubernatorial race that no one else is seeing, and by such huge margins, things could get very interesting Tuesday evening.
