Another Day, Another Annoying Poll

Struggling with the unlikely voter

Seeing some terror in the ranks over this poll of six battleground states issued by Washington Post (with the assistance of the Schar School of Government at George Mason University), particularly this result:

Even though these same respondents also seem to think Trump is a serious threat to democracy himself; a huge majority predicts that he will refuse to accept the results of the upcoming election, and a very substantial plurality believe Trump will "try to rule as a dictator" (while just a fifth, well within the crazification factor, suspect that Biden will do that).

I'm not going to be able to tell you definitively what's going on here, because I'm stuck on a still more insane feature, which is what it's a poll of—it's a poll of particularly unlikely voters, designated as "The Deciders" for a fairly good but confusing reason, because they're in fact people who find it particularly difficult to make up their minds, don't know for sure whom they are going to support, and are just as likely to decide not to vote at all. Assuming, though, that the electorate is extremely tightly polarized to the point where the likely voters are almost equally divided, which is not an unreasonable interpretation of the normal polling data, it's the unlikely voters who will actually make the decision, for better or for worse or at random, by the way they sort themselves out in November. That's insane as a fact, that the decision is going to be made by the people with the least ability to even think about it, but it is a kind of a fact, and I ought to feel kind of flattered by the Washington Post for working on it, because, as I wrote for the first time in 2017,

also have my own theory of American politics in general, which is that non-voters and unlikely voters play a decisive role that never gets enough attention from the pandits and apostles. Nearly half the population stays home in a national election in the US, and if they all came out it would certainly change things (this was Bernie's theory—he was just wrong in thinking he would bring them out). And one of the annoying things is the data is never presented in a way that makes it easy for me to figure out what the actual role of the nonvoter in a given election is going to be.

and this is the first time I've seen Big Journamalism working on it.

But the way they've chosen to do it is or seems to be incredibly weird. Namely, they've constructed a sample of the AZ, GA, NV, MI, PA, and WI population in which 61% of the respondents are classified as "Deciders",

---

A subset of 2,255 voters were classified as “Deciders” if they turned out in only one of the last two presidential elections, are ages 18 to 25, registered to vote since 2022, did not definitely plan to vote for Biden or Trump this year or switched support for party candidates between 2016 and 2020.

which should have sounded a warning signal that their criteria were overproducing (a reasonable rate would have been around 10%, I believe), and 100% of them are classified as "All key-state voters" and I have no clue whatsoever if they are weighting the data to define the second category. So the only line in the results that actually means something is the "Deciders" line. (Karl Rove claims to believe the 61% figure is an accurate result, but I'm pretty sure he's reading it wrong.)

Then again, that line has problems too, for instance in the democracy question, where polarization means that the threat to democracy some of the voters are thinking of, Trump's effort to annul the 2020 election, is exactly the opposite of the one others are thinking of, the 2020 election having been successfully stolen (or "stollen") from Trump. And then there's a kind of wacky Decider possibility, a Russia-Russia-Russia version of the Trump threat from which Trump himself has been magically separated, as in this Cletus Safari example: 

That latter category includes Matthew Titterington, 32, who lives in Milan, Mich., and works two part-time jobs, one in a bakery and another as a pharmacy tech. He said he is leaning toward voting for a third-party candidate, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., because he dislikes both major-party choices.

The biggest threats to democracy, Titterington said, are foreign governments that stoke internal divisions among Americans, and internal division that “prevents us from being able to function.” He doesn’t think either Biden or Trump is equipped to handle those threats.

We can figure when Biden supporters are answering the question it's with a Trump assault on democracy in mind, while Trump supporters are thinking about fantasies of millions of illegal immigrants casting ballots and the like, but we can't know what the "Deciders" are thinking about, except for a couple of hints in the data suggesting a Democratic lean on the question:

Substantially more of them than “all key-state voters” think Biden legitimately won, and substantially more of them think Trump is guilty. So it's possible more of them are answering the democracy question with the depressed idea that Biden will sadly fail to save us from the Trump threat, not that Biden threatens democracy himself—that agrees with the finding that's getting all the attention, at the top of the post (for these voters "neither" is way ahead of "Trump").

I don't know to what extent that one data point backs up my own hypothesis on the disengaged/unlikely voters, that their thinking clusters more on the Democratic policy side than some imaginary center, and that their tendency not to vote is based less on a sense that both parties are too extreme than a belief that Democrats in particular won't keep their promises (this is pretty much Bernie Sanders's theory of the same population, which doesn't mean it's wrong, just that Sanders couldn't figure out how to reach them). Most of the poll doesn't offer much of a contrast between the "Key states population" and the "Deciders" (which is another reason for wondering what's the point of the exercise), though the "Deciders" do seem slightly more accepting of the idea that government help for the poor is a good thing:

My main take would be that I'm glad to see somebody trying to do it, but I don't think they're doing it yet.