By JUSTIN BROWN
For eight years, pollsters have been striving to accurately capture former President Donald Trump’s level of support among voters. Even today, on the eve of his third campaign for the presidency, there’s no confidence they’ve nailed it. It raises a question that not enough people are asking: If it’s taken that long to adjust for Trump, is 100 days enough to accurately poll potential Vice President Kamala Harris voters?
It’s not just an academic question. There’s reason to believe that, just as proved to be the case with Trump, there is a fuller range of Harris voters who aren’t being measured.
In this election cycle, pollsters have made a clear effort to explore various methodologies that enable a deeper dive into Trump’s areas of support that were previously underrepresented in past polling. But when asked about the challenge of tracking an abbreviated Harris campaign in the wake of an historic candidate swap, some pollsters believed that the polling transition from Biden to Harris would be “relatively seamless.”
The difference in reaction can be attributed to the supposed existence of the “shy Trump voter.” Many have hypothesized in the past that a subset of Trump voters only support their candidate behind closed doors and shy away from revealing their political preference to their friends, family and especially pollsters. But this election feels different. Trump voters have only grown brasher and bolder over the years, and it’s not just the appearance of pro-Trump boat flotillas, car caravans and pop-up MAGA merch stores. The shift away from their supposed “shyness” is also characterized by the emergence of movements like the Courage Tour: a series of multi-day events in swing states that calls upon conservative Christians to speak up more forcefully on political matters by casting them as the “voice to the nation’s conscience.”
While Trump voters have found their voice and the polls have adapted to better hear them, the same cannot be said for many “forgotten” Harris voters that polls are ill-equipped to capture. These voters are not necessarily “shy” with their support for Harris, instead they are overlooked by current polling methods. One such group is a subset of Republicans who increasingly feel politically homeless within their own party: Nikki Haley voters.
A national survey of Nikki Haley’s primary voters conducted in early October by the Democratic polling firm Blueprint has charted this group’s slow but significant shift away from supporting Trump and their increasing willingness to support Democratic presidential candidates over time. (Notably, this survey excludes registered Democrats who voted for Nikki Haley in primaries to ensure the results truly reflect Republican-leaning voter sentiments.) The survey showed that while 66 percent of Haley primary voters supported Trump in 2016, that number dropped to 59 percent in 2020 and is expected to drop even further to 45 percent in this year’s election. Meanwhile, their support for the Democratic presidential nominee has nearly tripled from only 13 percent supporting Hillary Clinton in 2016 to 36 percent indicating an intent to vote for Kamala Harris.
This article was originally published in Politico.