The Trump question

Pollsters mull the former president’s lingering influence, polling trends

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After the polling experts on a panel had their say, it was the audience’s turn for questions. “If you were giving advice to Mr. Trump, would you tell him to come into the state? If so, when?” asked Van Mobley, village president of Thiensville, at the 2022 WisPolitics Midwest Polling Summit at the Madison Club. 

“He will come at the time and place of his choosing,” Charles Franklin, the Marquette Law School polling director, said to laughter. 

It’s a question on many people’s minds: Would a Trump visit help decide potential close races on Nov. 8 between Gov. Tony Evers and Tim Michels, and between Sen. Ron Johnson and Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes?

“If I were a Republican candidate, I’d rather have Trump here than Biden for the Democrat side,” Bob Ward of Fabrizio Ward, a public affairs opinion research and strategic consulting firm, said at the Sept. 29 summit. He argued that Biden’s approval rating is higher than Trump’s among independent voters in Wisconsin, so with close races for governor and U.S. Senate, a Trump visit could lead more independents to vote Republican in November. While Trump isn’t on the ballot, Ward added, “he’s hovering.” It’s inevitable, in Ward’s opinion, that Trump will influence voters in some way in this upcoming election. 

“He’s a force,” agreed Natalie Jackson, the director of research at the Public Religion Research Institute.

The panel discussion was one part of this year’s polling summit, where the discussion centered on polling trends and factors affecting the polling field. 

Emily Swanson, polling director of the Associated Press, and Jennifer Agiesta, polling director of CNN, also spoke at the event. They said top issues for voters were the economy, inflation, abortion and climate change. But, as is often the case, the conversation drifted to Trump and his impact on polling and elections.

Franklin said it’s difficult to determine if people who voted for Trump in 2020 will vote for Michels and Johnson in November, but he said state and national polling from Marquette Law School indicates Trump is still highly favored among the Republican electorate. In a recent interview with Politico, Franklin addressed questions about pre-election polls in 2016 and 2020, which indicated significantly lower support for Republican candidates than materialized on Election Day. He says this phenomenon could partially be due to Trump supporters’ lack of participation in polls. And if this is the case, polls for this year’s midterm might not underestimate support for Republican candidates as much because Trump isn’t on the ballot. 

Even so, the panelists agreed pollsters have revised their techniques for contacting and communicating with potential survey respondents and need to continue to fine-tune their sampling methods to ensure results are accurate and representative of voters. 

“In every election cycle in recent memory, we’re doing something different than we did in the previous election cycle,” Ward said. 

Swanson and Agiesta weighed in on this issue during the Summit as well, noting that journalists need to be more careful about how they convey polling results, especially when such coverage can affect how, or whether, the public interacts with this information. As an example, Swanson referenced polls that asked respondents about the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election. 

“When we’re doing polling on something we know not to be true, we need to make it clear in our stories about that poll that it’s not true,” Swanson said. 

Polling isn’t only about politics either, Swanson added. “We really focused on politics here, but when we’re talking about polling, we’re also talking about attitudes related to things that aren’t political,” she said. “We’re talking about personal experiences that people have, and I don’t think that I foresee a world in which polling isn’t going to be important to informing our understanding of all of those issues.”