Who is going to vote in November?
Campaign professionals, pollsters and virtually everyone who has been following politics in 2018 knows that turnout has been anything but predictable. In what is constantly referred to as a potential “surge” year, many campaign professionals are hedging turnout bets with models anchored to the equivalent of: small, medium or large segments of potential voters who may or may not swing the election.
At Change Research, we think turnout modeling ought to be rooted in empirical insights collected from voters this year, which is why today we are announcing our Turnout Impact 2018 project.
We’re doing before and after polling in special elections and primaries in 2018. We’re asking Democratic, Republican, Independent and decline-to-state voters whether they plan to vote, what issues are most important to them, surveying hot-button national issues like gun violence protection and the economy; and then surveying them immediately following the election to find out whether they voted how they said they would. We’ll use these insights to refine and update our model of who’s most likely to vote — not by using “previous midterm election models” (translation: models built on data from four years ago) but by modeling from this year’s elections.
We’ll be sharing insights with the public via our Turnout Insight blog posts. We will share insight that’s unique to each state or election, and we’ll assess how it aligns cumulatively with the data we’re collecting from other races.
Our average sample size for these special elections is 1000+ likely voters. We plan to collect more than 100,000 surveys before the November elections. We’ll be measuring data across campaigns to advise candidates and allies based on what we’re seeing from analyzing data at scale.
Here’s a peek at some insight we’ve gathered so far —
— Get Out The Vote efforts work. People who reported being contacted by any campaign were far more likely to vote
— 2016 Clinton voters who stated they’d definitely vote have been far more likely to actually vote: 84% voted, compared to 74% of 2016 Trump voters
— People with strong feelings vote:
- 60% of people who gave Trump a 1 (strongly disapprove) on a 10-point scale voted
- 60% of people who gave Trump a 10 (strongly approve) on a 10-point scale voted
- People who rated Trump between 2 and 9 voted at a rate of just 42%
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