Rove points to ‘broken’ polling
WASHINGTON — Veteran GOP strategist Karl Rove says political polling is “broken,” but he still believes the trends ahead of the midterms indicate Republicans will do well in November — as long as former President Donald Trump keeps quiet for the next few weeks.
Rove said the rise of cellphones has made polling — once done easily by automatically dialing landlines — “an utter, unmitigated mess.”
On top of that, he said he believes America has developed a problem long seen in Britain, in which conservative voters are underrepresented in polls because “Trump supporters are not comfortable saying it to an anonymous stranger.”
“Polling is broken, let’s just be honest about it,” Rove said during a Wall Street Journal event in Dallas on Monday night. “We used to endow it with scientific precision that it probably had some of, but now it’s a crapshoot.”
Rove said he still likes polls and looks at a lot of them, but he’s looking for trends across polls, rather than specific numbers.
For instance, he pointed to a New York Times/Siena poll released Monday that showed a massive shift in women who identified as independent voters. In September, they supported Democrats by 14 points. The poll now found them backing Republicans by 18 points. But Rove said the sample size of 792 registered voters was too small for the findings to be reliable.
Still, he said it fits with a broader trend that polls have shown of independent voters moving toward Republicans in the final weeks of the election.
“I’m looking for movement,” Rove said.
Rove said he believes that shift is happening because economic issues are once again coming to the fore after headlines about the August FBI raid at Mar-a-Lago dominated headlines for weeks.
Rove said it underscores the waning power Trump’s endorsement has in the general election.
“There’s a difference between a primary and a general election, and one of the things that’s happening is everybody’s polling and they’re finding out that while it was helpful in the primary, unless it’s Alabama or Mississippi, it’s not necessarily good in the general election,” Rove said.
Rove said the trend was clear in 2020 when GOP state House candidates at the bottom of the ballot outperformed Trump in their districts in Texas, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada.
“In all of those states, the Republican legislator at bottom of ballot runs ahead of Donald Trump in their district,” he said. “People are finding that out.”