Voter enthusiasm is a better indicator of election outcomes than generic ballot polling questions, Republican pollster Ed Goeas said Wednesday.
“The thing we really look at as pollsters is the intensity of the vote, it’s not where the generic ballot is going. That’s kind of good for the press but not where we as strategists kind of look at,” Goeas said during a panel discussion on Hill.TV’s “What America’s Thinking.”
According to Goeas, Republicans have been able to win off-year elections because its voters are often more interested in supporting their party.
“In 2010, we had a 10-point advantage; in 2014, we had an 11-point advantage,” he said, referring to two mid-term election years when Republicans were able to make significant gains in congressional races.
By contrast, Republicans had an 8-point intensity disadvantage in 2006 when Democrats won control of both the House and the Senate.
Democratic strategists have argued that generic ballot questions are useful barometers of public support, while arguing that a combination of Republican gerrymandering and left-leaning Americans moving into urban areas means Democrats must maintain significantly higher support in the national popular vote in order to get majorities in the Congress or the Electoral College.
In the 2016 Senate elections, 45.2 million Americans voted for a Democratic candidate, compared with 39.3 million who voted for a Republican. President Trump also lost the popular vote — 48 percent to 46 percent — to Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton that same year.
In the Hill.TV discussion, Goeas blamed Republicans’ persistent lower marks in generic ballot questions on “minority” congressional districts that he says are heavily Democratic and thus skew the numbers.
“You almost have to take them out to see what the averages of the rest are,” he said. “There aren’t any Republican districts in the country that are 80 percent generically Republican, so there’s a bias.”
His remarks came in response to an earlier comment by Mark Penn, one of former President Clinton’s top pollsters, who said, “Historical performance has suggested that there is a Democratic bias in the generic question.”
—Matthew Sheffield
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