Former President Donald Trump is a polls guy. He loves his polls – in part because he’s crushing his GOP presidential primary opponents in, well, all of them, and in part because, whether good or bad, they give him something to build a narrative around.
Such was the case in 2016, when he was well behind former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the months leading up to the presidential election yet used his underdog status to effectively energize his supporters to turn out for him. Trump went on to capture the White House and the rest, as they say, is history.
The bizarro Bradley Effect – the phenomenon in which voters tell pollsters what they think they want to hear – turned out to be true. Named for former Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, who lost the 1982 California gubernatorial race in a stunning upset despite surveys putting him comfortably ahead, researchers suspect sometimes respondents don’t always answer accurately. In Bradley’s case, the leading theory is that voters didn’t want to appear racist to pollsters by not supporting a Black candidate. But in Trump’s situation, they may have been simply ashamed to admit that they supported a reality TV star – a populist billionaire without any governing, military or public service experience.
Fast forward seven years, and the now twice-impeached former president, who faces 91 criminal charges across four indictments, is the by-far leader of the stampede of Republican candidates vying for the GOP nomination. In fact, some polls show the former president up by more than 50 percentage points over his primary opponents, even as he stands accused of attempting to overturn the 2020 presidential election and of inciting an insurrection at the Capitol.
“GREAT POLLS!!!” he posted to his social media site on Thursday.
Could it be, though, that the same faulty polling that catapulted Trump to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in 2016 now stands to spoil his comeback tour? That his once-ardent supporters – or at least some of them – are perhaps masking their doubts, pledging their support while also watching with wary eyes as many in his inner circle plead guilty to undermining democracy?
“I think that there is some truth in that,” says Adam Geller, a long-time Republican strategist and pollster and founder and CEO of National Research Inc., a polling and political research firm.
“It’s his softer supporters who are maybe reporting as a Trump voter in a poll but could be very well looking around, getting a little nervous, getting a little less comfortable as things evolve. The ardent supporter is all in, still wearing the MAGA hat and putting signs up in their front lawn. But then there is that other layer who could get peeled off, who is reporting as a Trump voter in a poll. But some of those doubts are starting to seep in.”
“It’s tough to measure that, but I believe that there is something to that.”
At least one of Trump’s primary opponents sees some evidence of it in fresh polling from New Hampshire.
Internal polling from the former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s presidential campaign shows that nearly 3 out of 4 Trump supporters in New Hampshire say that they could change their mind between now and the primary election. And there’s precedent for that in New Hampshire, a state where Christie has practically become a resident by virtue of how often he’s been campaigning there. In 2016, 50% of Granite State Republicans said they made their decision in the three days leading up to the primary, and, of those, 20% made their decision on primary day.
“That is why I don’t worry necessarily about where the polls stand now,” Christie told reporters earlier this week. “When you look at these polls, they’re fine for today. But the election isn’t today.”
Moreover, he said, the last three GOP winners of the Iowa caucuses were not the same candidates who were leading the polls at Thanksgiving time.
Editorial Cartoons on Donald Trump
Indeed, Mitt Romney was the decided front-runner in 2007, but former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee ended up winning the caucus despite polling at just 4% at the end of November. In 2011, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich was leading the pack, but former Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, who was polling at 3% around Thanksgiving time, won. And in 2015, Ben Carson was polling 10 points ahead of Trump, but Texas Sen. Ted Cruz won – even though he had been polling around 7% some 50 days before the contest.
“What we’ve seen in those three instances in Iowa,” Christie said, “an early state that acts very similar to New Hampshire in terms of late deciding, you can see they really decided late. You have three men who were in single digits in Thanksgiving who ended up winning the Iowa caucuses.”
Christie, who’s strategy has been to wage a no-holds-barred, combative anti-Trump campaign, hasn’t consolidated the non-MAGA Republican voting base as he had planned. He’s currently languishing in fourth place, according to polls, behind Trump, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley. But as long as his campaign’s polling shows signs of wiggle room, he’s not backing out just yet.
“We feel really good about where we are,” he said. “We are not going to play this game of process stories and which donor am I meeting with and which donor am I getting a check from. We have plenty of money to compete. I’m playing to the voters of New Hampshire. They’re the ones who are going to decide.”
A handful of signs bolster Christie’s theory that Trump’s support could be much softer than the polls portray – though they’re not necessarily net positives for Christie’s campaign. For one, the field is shrinking. With South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott dropping out last week and little to no path forward for entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, it’s down to three opponents chasing the former president. And while Trump’s legal woes have yet to dent his support, they introduce a potentially annoying fatigue for voters, especially those in must-win Georgia, where he stands accused of attempting to overturn the 2020 election results.
Over the summer, Mark McKinnon, the co-founder of the centrist group No Labels and chief media strategist for former President George W. Bush and Sen. John McCain during his presidential bid, wrote about the idea of Trump’s “ghost voters” – that is, and he describes, “voters who appear to be for Trump but will actually disappear” by the Iowa caucus.
“In 2016, we experienced the phenomenon of the silent Trump voter, those who were secretly for Trump but feared being ostracized if they said so publicly,” he wrote. “This cycle, we may have precisely the opposite: Republican voters who are afraid not to say they are for Trump publicly and yet quietly acknowledge he’d be likely to lose the general election. These are the Trump ghost voters. They appear to be there … but are just as likely to disappear into the electoral mists.”
The key to understanding Trump’s polling, says Whit Ayres, founder and president of North Star Opinion Research and long-time GOP political consultant, is to recognize the role that the three factions of the Republican Party today stand to play: The so-called “Never Trumpers,” who constitute somewhere between 10% to 12% of the party, the “Always Trumpers,” who makeup about 35%, and the “Maybe Trumpers,” who represent the majority of the GOP.
“A majority of the party is Maybe Trump,” Ayres says. “They voted for Trump twice and they’d vote for him again in a heartbeat against Joe Biden, but they’re open to considering other candidates either because they feel like Trump carries too much baggage or he might have difficulty winning next year.”
“The question is,” he says, “whether one of the other alternative candidates can capture and consolidate that Maybe Trump vote. To the extent that they have not done so, some of that will go toward Trump, but it could be peeled off with the right alternative candidate or the right campaign.”
The latest polling on the New Hampshire primary, for example, shows Trump with 42% of support from likely voters, followed by Haley with 20%, Christie with 14%, DeSantis with 9% and Ramaswamy with 8%. The polling, conducted by the University of New Hampshire Survey Center from Nov. 9-14, supports the idea that if a candidate were able to consolidate support, it would be enough to beat Trump outright – without even needing to strip off a layer of Maybe Trumpers. A separate New Hampshire primary poll from Monmouth University and The Washington Post taken Nov. 9-14 shows similar results.
Meanwhile, in Iowa, a slew of polls mirror what’s possible in New Hampshire should a candidate break out in the next 50 days, including the latest by Civiqs, conducted Nov. 10-15: Trump leads the pack with 54% support from likely voters, followed by DeSantis at 18%, Haley at 12%, Ramaswamy at 6%, and Christie at 3%.
The problem is, at least as it stands today, no candidate has effectively collapsed that support. Haley, who is on the upswing and fresh off of a funding endorsement from the Koch network and high praise from JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, has a message that’s most likely to move the Maybe Trumpers into her orbit, Ayres says – essentially, that Trump was the right president for the moment and did some good things but that it’s time to pass the torch to a new generation. DeSantis seems to be flat-lining, and Christie’s anti-Trump message appears to have a ceiling that will make it virtually impossible for him to garner enough support.
“Criticizing Trump for those people is like criticizing Jesus in a rural Evangelical church. Criticize all you want, it’s going to have no effect on Jesus’ reputation, but it will trash the reputation of the person who criticizes him,” he says. “You can’t argue that Trump is unfit for office and hope to persuade any of those Maybe Trumpers because they voted for him twice and they don’t want to admit that they voted for somebody who is unfit for office.”
As he has done with the first three GOP primary debates, Trump announced this week that he plans to skip the fourth, set to take place next week in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Instead, he’s scheduled to host a closed-door fundraiser in Florida. Christie says he hopes his primary opponents join him in making sharper critiques of Trump.
“The cake isn’t baked. There is still a lot of room for movement,” Geller says. “And even though it seems like it’s right around the corner, there is still a lot of time left where the candidates are all going to be working as hard as they can to persuade and to motivate.”
