are the Pollsters Missing? // (Steven Hayward)
The most striking finding from the latest Wall Street Journal survey about the mid-term elections is the yuuuge swing by suburban women towards the GOP since August.
The latest survey shows that white suburban women, who make up 20%, now favor Republicans for Congress by 15%. This is a shift of 27 percentage points from the August Journal poll.
This is a huge move. The Journal article explains that the shift is not just limited to congressional preference but appears to be cascading down the ticket. This is why? The Journal suggests that the reaction to the Dobbs decision is over. While this is possible, it’s less convincing the more you think about it. What has changed in August? You’d expect the exact opposite. Democrats have intensified anti- Dobbs messaging. This should reinforce the pro-choice leanings suburban women. Is it inflation? This explanation is less convincing than the one that was used for August’s inflation. Crime? The same thing.
Although all opinion polls cite crime and inflation as the driving issues of concern, I have noticed some notable omissions in the issue panels that pollsters use to identify the key drivers of voter opinion. These include the COVID school closing hangover and the cultural issues facing public education today (especially “gender flexibility” and other enthusiasms of the cultural right). These issues played a significant role in the race for Virginia governor last year, but they are rarely asked about in polls.
Even though the Democrat-media-complex whipped up a fury over Gov. Even though DeSantis’s Florida bill to “don’t speak gay” was widely criticized, polling revealed that even the majority of Democrats voted for the bill that only prohibited sex education in the third grade. The country is experiencing a flurry of local school board elections. There is a growing backlash against the left-controlled public education system. You’d think that pollsters would pay more attention to education when San Francisco voters recall three of the woke school board members.
Most pollsters don’t know how or are afraid to ask questions to find out public opinion about cultural issues in public education. This is political malpractice at its finest. Instead, we get polls such as the one by NBC News that found “threats against democracy” to be the top concern for voters. This is because the choice was presented to respondents and not arising from an open-ended survey. Respondents were not allowed to choose education as their “top issue”.
Although it sounds sexist to say this, empirical voting research shows that women voters pay more attention to local issues than men voters. This includes education. These issues may be driving a lot the shift in suburban women. One test will be in Maine where, as Tom Klingenstein explained yesterday in his article, the former Maine governor. Paul LePage is making radical and often shockingly graphic gender-denying books and curricula a central issue of his comeback campaign against Janet Page, Democrat incumbent. Gov. Page is trying to impose a neutrality on the issue. But voters already know which party supports this type of radical propaganda and the destructive COVID school closures. It will be interesting for the exit polls to decide if any of this is being discussed next Tuesday.
