Your polling results this year were a lot less accurate than they were in 2020. You consistently overestimated Republican support by quite a bit — an average of 7.5 percent in the Senate races. In Michigan, you had Tudor Dixon beating Gretchen Whitmer by one percent, and she ended up losing by 12. You had Washington senator Patty Murray up by one, and she ended up winning by 15. And so forth.
The thing is if you look at the last three weeks, nobody was right. We had two things happen. We had a lack of other polling this fall — I’m sure you’ve noticed that the big networks didn’t do anything in the last couple of weeks, which is surprising.
Yes, it was mostly lesser-known outfits in the last two or three weeks.
And that’s not necessarily our fault. They’re usually there, and they aren’t there. I mean, if you want to ask what I think happened — and we’re going to spend a lot of time studying this — but on first blush, Republicans have no idea how to do “get out the vote.” The Democrats are very good at it.
Our polls in Ohio weren’t very far off. North Carolina, Missouri, and even the race for governor in Nevada — those were all relatively close. And even the races we lost, we had all of those within two or three points. But the bottom line is the Democrats had better overall strategy. The Republicans just did not strategize well. It is hard to anticipate in polling one party doing that great a job at getting the vote out in targeted states and the other party doing that terrible of a job at getting the vote out in targeted states.
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