GOP Voters Are Being Undercounted Again: Independent Pollster

Virginia residents vote at the Fairfax County Government Center in Fairfax, Va., on Nov. 02, 2021. (Win McNamee/Getty Images)

A top independent pollster suggested that Republican voters are being undercounted in surveys ahead of the Nov. 8 midterm elections.

Robert Cahaly, Trafalgar Group’s founder and its senior strategist and pollster, said Republicans might not be inclined to reveal their political views to pollsters following President Joe Biden’s speech on Sept. 1 targeting “MAGA Republicans.”

“These submerged voters aren’t answering polls, they aren’t putting stickers on their cars, or signs in their yard—they’re not even posting on social media,” Cahaly said in a Daily Wire podcast. “They are underwater. They’re not saying a word to anybody until election day.”

What’s more, Cahaly asserted that voters should not trust mainstream polls in the coming weeks, noting that previous elections undercounted Republicans and favored Democrats.

“Polls have two purposes,” he said. “They’re either to reflect the electorate, or they’re to affect the electorate—and too many of these media and university-based polls are designed to affect the electorate and are trying to create a false narrative quite often when there’s not one.”

Cahaly made reference to the Biden speech in Philadelphia that accused supporters of former President Donald Trump of being a threat to U.S. institutions, coming just a few weeks after the FBI’s raid of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort. While he spoke in front of a dark red-lit background flanked by two Marines, Biden said Trump and his followers “represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations” of the United States.

Prior Polls

During the 2020 election cycle, there were “hidden voters” that were undercounted, Cahaly wrote on Twitter several weeks ago.

President Joe Biden delivers a primetime speech at Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia on Sept. 1, 2022. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)

“Now [the] Biden administration has essentially classified ‘MAGA Republicans’ as a threat to democracy marshaling federal law enforcement to focus on them,” the pollster wrote at the time. “This move has created a new type of voter that will be even harder to poll or even estimate.”

Other commentators have noted that polls in 2020 often missed the mark.

“It’s clear that national and many state estimates were not just off, but off in the same direction: They favored the Democratic candidate,” the Pew Research Center wrote on Nov. 13, 2020.

And polls, it added, “overestimated the Democratic advantage by an average of about 4 percentage points” during that election. “When looking at national polls, the Democratic overstatement will end up being similar, about 4 points, depending on the final vote count.”

In 2016, polls also were inaccurate and biased in favor of Democrats, Cahaly argued.

“In 2016, Trump supporters were called ‘Deplorables’ and other unflattering names,” Cahaly said on Twitter, referring to Hillary Clinton’s now-infamous “basket of deplorables” remark. “This was a major contributor to the ‘shy Trump voter’ phenomenon that ‘most’ polling missed, which resulted in a major loss in public confidence for polling flowing the election.”

False Hope?

Following the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act bill several months ago, Biden received glowing coverage from legacy news outlets. Some even claimed that the president could make a “comeback” following poor polling for the president.

Historically, the party of the president tends to lose congressional seats in the midterms. Democrats currently enjoy very slim majorities in both the Senate and House.

“National polls can misrepresent the Electoral College, and statewide polls can obscure outcomes in congressional districts,” former House Speaker Newt Gingrich in an article for The Epoch Times late last month.

“In early October 2016, Hillary Clinton was only ahead by 3 points nationally—and she was running up huge margins in California and New York (two of our four most populous states). The media believed she would be the next president. But she didn’t have the advantage in the heavily contested states (which meant she wasn’t winning the Electoral College).”