Midterms Poll Republicans: Weighting on Voting in 2020 and Implications for Voting Methods of Registrantship and Election Participation

We’re weighting on method of voting in 2020 — whether people voted by mail, early or absentee. Even though the partisanship of a registrant can be considered, it is still an important predictor of vote choice. Registered Republicans who voted on Election Day, for instance, were more likely to back Donald J. Trump than those who voted by mail. Weighting on this in 2020 wouldn’t have made a major difference, but it would have brought some of our polls about half a point or so closer to the final result.

Additional data about the attitudes of respondents is used to determine whether or not they’re going to vote. At the same time, we now give even more weight to a respondent’s track record of voting than we did in the past.

I would love to run an experiment on this at some point, but we are moving respondents into the “some college” category for now. By doing so, we modestly increase the weight we give to those categorized as high school graduates (who are pretty Republican), and decrease the weight on the other group (who still lean Republican but somewhat less so). Unfortunately, had we done this, it would have improved our result by only about a quarter of a point in 2020 — despite the number of words I just dedicated to the topic.

This is not easy to understand. When determining the number of voters in a survey, pollsters need to determine if people who went to either technical or college should be counted as high school graduates. They have to make a decision because the Census Bureau does not count a trade or vocation school as an educational level. The Census Bureau believes that they are in the category of high school graduates. The Times/Siena poll (and many other pollsters) previously counted them the same way.

But this choice isn’t necessarily straightforward. Whether it’s the right choice in practice depends on whether census interviewers and respondents handle this question the way the census would like. If you completed a professional technical program at, say, Renton Technical College, there’s a chance you selected one of the various “some college” options on the census American Community Survey or the Current Population Survey.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/17/upshot/midterms-poll-republicans-lead.html

Getting Out of the Taboo: How Hispanics Will Respond to Donald Trump’s 2024 Campaign and What Their Role in God’s Word Have They Learned

We are considering the source of cellphones in determining who we will call. This is the last point in this newsletter, so you can go on with the rest of your day if your eyes are glazing over, but I think it might be the most interesting to a subset of you, especially those who conduct polls.

It’s not surprising that most have yet to make up their minds, since the votes of the first campaign will be over a year away. But the talk of 2024 — of Mr. Trump, who spent years courting evangelicals, and of Mr. DeSantis, who has leaned into the cultural battles that appeal to many conservative Christians — showed both the heightened expectations among Hispanic evangelical leaders in Florida and their desire to demonstrate the potency of their now unabashedly politicized Christianity.

Dionny Bez, a Miami pastor who leads a network of churches, said that it is about morals, and there is one party currently that reflects our morals. “We cannot be afraid to remind people that we have values that the Republicans are willing to fight for. Making clear what we believe is a responsibility I have. We can no longer make that taboo.”

Almost one-third of Republican partisans identify as evangelical Christians. In a recent poll conducted for The Bulwark, a conservative website, veteran GOP pollster Whit Ayres projected White evangelicals as almost two-fifths of the likely 2024 GOP primary electorate.

He signed a law banning abortions after 15 weeks of age in a church. He appealed to Cubans in the state and also immigrants from Venezuela and Nicaragua, both of which helped swell the pews at evangelical churches in Florida. Many expect Mr. DeSantis to try to use Hispanic support to his advantage in a presidential campaign.

Demographics in the 2020 South Carolina Primary: When Donald Trump becomes President Donald Trump if he moves on from the blue-collar evangelicals

With some prominent evangelical figures joining other GOP leaders in publicly suggesting that the party should move on from President Trump, the former president will find it hard to build a winning primary coalition if he can’t win over blue-collar evangelicals the same way he did in his stunning race to the

Guth said that DeSantis, with a somewhat more buttoned-down (if only faintly less combative) style than Trump may be well suited to attract college-educated Republican voters, especially evangelicals, “who don’t like the Trump style even though they like the Trump policies.” With DeSantis “already fighting the culture wars,” in a way that establishes his social conservative credentials, Guth said it’s likely that “the middle class and upper middle class evangelical types will certainly find him more appealing than Trump, especially after the events of January 6.”

The results of the Public Religion Research Institute will be released in a few weeks and they will show that the percentage of white evangelical Protestants has decreased in the last four years. They are still an important component of the GOP coalition.

The 2008 and 2012 GOP presidential primaries had two candidates who relied heavily on support from evangelicals and one who relied mostly on non-evangelicals. In 2008 and 2012 both Romney and McCain won more than 50% of the non-evangelical Republicans in their GOP primary, which allowed them to prevail even though they did not get as many votes as they should have.

Early indications are that education will remain a critical fault line in the 2024 GOP race, including among evangelical voters. Ayres said that in the recent 2024 polling he conducted for The Bulwark, Trump ran about even with DeSantis among non-college evangelicals when the two were matched with a large field of potential contenders, while DeSantis led the former president fairly comfortably among both college-educated evangelicals and non-evangelicals with and without a degree.

The president and executive director of the Palmetto Family Council, which is the most prominent social conservatives in South Carolina, sees an opening emerging for alternatives to Trump, more than just educational lines. “You’ve got a group of people who are followers of Donald Trump from a populist standpoint,” he said. The other groups believe that they need a new standard bearer for the conservatives so that they can stay relevant for another two or three decades.