The GOP voters who could decide Trump’s fate in a few years

Midterms Poll Republicans Lead: Detecting a Career in Technical School Education Using the Attitude of a Respondent’s Track Record of Voting

The method of voting in 2020 will be determined by whether people vote early, mail or via Absentee. It’s an important predictor of vote choice, even after considering the partisanship of a registrant. Republicans who voted by mail were more likely to back Trump than Republicans who voted in person. Some polls could have been closer to the final result, if we had weighted this in 2020.

We now use more information on the attitudes of respondents in determining if they are going to vote or not. We used to give more weight to a person’s track record of voting than we do now.

I’d like to run an experiment on this at some point, but for the moment we’re moving respondents like these into the “some college” category. By doing so, we modestly increase the weight we give to those categorized as high school graduates (who are pretty Republican), and decrease the weight on the other group (who still lean Republican but somewhat less so). Unfortunately, had we done this, it would have improved our result by only about a quarter of a point in 2020 — despite the number of words I just dedicated to the topic.

This is a little complicated. Basically, pollsters need to decide whether people who went to technical or vocational school count as “high school graduates” or “some college” when they’re adjusting their surveys to make sure they have the right number of voters by educational group. They have to choose, because the Census Bureau doesn’t count a trade or vocational school as a level of educational attainment. The Census Bureau believes that they’re in the category of high school graduates. The Times/Siena poll (and many other pollsters) previously counted them the same way.

But this choice isn’t necessarily straightforward. Whether it’s the right choice in practice depends on whether census interviewers and respondents handle this question the way the census would like. If you completed a professional technical program at, say, Renton Technical College, there’s a chance you selected one of the various “some college” options on the census American Community Survey or the Current Population Survey.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/17/upshot/midterms-poll-republicans-lead.html

How the cellphones will help us understand where we come from and what we can do to help them in the 2024 midterm election: a case study of Florida pastor Dionny Bez

On a totally different topic, we now consider the source of cellphones in determining whom we’ll call (Wonkiness rating: 8/10). It’s the last point in the newsletter so you can keep going with the rest of your day if your eyes are burning up, but I think it’s more interesting for those who conduct polls.

The same dilemma might arise if he runs, the same one that Trump faced in 2016 when a crowded field of Republicans never coalesced behind a single alternative and they split their vote. On paper, many of the other Republicans considering the 2024 race – a list that includes Nikki Haley, Larry Hogan, Chris Sununu, Glenn Youngkin, Mike Pompeo and Tim Scott – again appear better positioned to attract college-educated voters than to poach significant numbers of non-college voters from Trump.

According to Dionny Bez, a Miami pastor who leads a network of churches, one party reflects the morals of the people. “We cannot be afraid to remind people that we have values that the Republicans are willing to fight for. I have a responsibility to make clear what we believe. It is no longer taboo to say that.

In PRRI’s data, just under one-third of Republican partisans identify as evangelical Christians. A recent poll done for The Bulwark, a conservative website, showed that White evangelicals were almost twofifths of the likely GOP primary electorate in four years.

He signed a law prohibiting abortions after 15 weeks last year at the Nacin de Fe mega church. He declared Nov. 7, the day before the midterm election, as “Victims of Communism Day,” appealing not just to Cubans in the state, but also immigrants from Venezuela and Nicaragua, who have helped swell the pews of evangelical churches in Florida. His campaign aides frequently spoke with Hispanic pastors, cultivating support that many expect Mr. DeSantis to try to capitalize on in a presidential campaign.

The Education Divide as a Divider for Alternatives to Trump: Implications for the First Two and Three-Decade Candidates in South Carolina

Republican presidential preference polls show that Trump’s position is weaker than it was in 2016 among people with a four-year college degree as well as people who don’t.

The Cruz campaign said after his South Carolina victory that they expected to beat the New Yorker in upcoming contests where evangelical Christians comprise a majority of GOP primary voters. The exit polls showed that Trump beat Cruz among non-college White evangelicals in Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Tennessee and Virginia as well as Michigan and tied him with those voters in Arkansas and Missouri. It was critical to Trump capturing all of the states and winning the nomination easily.

The results from the Public Religion Research Institute are expected later this month, and they will show that the number of white evangelical Protestants has gone down from about one-fourth in 2006 to about one-seventh. They are still more important to the GOP coalition.

In the earlier races, education became an important dividing line as Romney won college-educated voters in more states than he did non-college voters. The most important variable in those contests was whether voters were evangelicals or not. In the decisive 2008 South Carolina primary, for instance, McCain won a much higher share of voters who were not evangelicals than those who were, and there were only minimal differences between those with and without college degrees in each group. The educational divide in South Carolina did not affect the vote of Romney, Santorum and Gingrich as much as the evangelical divide did.

The advantage that Trump had over Cruz among evangelicals was because he was able to get people without degrees to vote for him. Ayres said the education divide is a better predictor of Trump’s strength than the non-evangelical divide.

Dave Wilson, president and executive director of the Palmetto Family Council, the most prominent social conservative organization in South Carolina, also sees an opening emerging for DeSantis or other alternatives to Trump, less on educational than generational lines. “You’ve got a group of people who are followers of Donald Trump from a populist standpoint,” he said. “But I… keep seeing there are other groups who are saying, ‘we are looking for a new standard bearer of the conservative message-someone who can take that beyond the next eight years to the next two or three decades.’”