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If President Trump musters an Electoral College victory on Tuesday, at least one pollster, and perhaps just one, will be able to say, “I told you so.”
That person is Robert Cahaly, whose Trafalgar Group this year has published a steady stream of state battlefield polls showing the president is highly competitive against Joseph R. Biden Jr., and often ahead, in states where the majority of pollsters have shown a stable Biden. lead.
Trafalgar does not disclose his methods, and other pollsters consider him too shady to be taken seriously. Mostly, they dismiss it as an outlier. But for Mr. Cahaly, “I told you so” is already a business card.
In 2016, the first time it published polls, Trafalgar was the company whose state polls most effectively foreshadowed Trump’s surprise victory. A veteran Republican strategist, Cahaly even rated the exact number of Electoral College votes Trump and Hillary Clinton would receive (306-227), though his prediction of which states would get them there was a bit off.
So, with liberal anxieties burning over whether to trust the polls, the outgoing Mr. Cahaly, who wears a goatee and bow tie, has been in demand on the cable news lately. In addition to frequent appearances on Fox News, Cahaly was on CNN last week, explaining to Michael Smerconish why he thought the president would walk away with an easy victory and fending off a battery of criticism that Smerconish called out. one by one, from Mr. Cahaly’s companions.
Amid a deluge of pre-election media coverage seeking his theory of the case (it generated more than 1.5 million clicks on the Trafalgar site on Monday, he said), the big question seems to be: Is it possible to believe a guy whose polls consistently give Trump only enough support for a narrow lead in most swing states, and who refuses to reveal much about how he gets his data?
In his latest polls this election season, Cahaly has found Trump two- to three-point leads in North Carolina, Arizona, Michigan and Florida, and more leads elsewhere. That sets him far apart from almost all of the major pollsters, whose polls in those states generally show Biden at the edge. As different as things may be this year, it’s hard to miss the echo of 2016, when Trafalgar took an equally lonely position on the eve of November 8.
Above all, Mr. Cahaly’s approach centers on the belief that everyone is lying, but especially conservatives. This has been largely refuted by the social sciences, but that has not softened their conviction. To hear him explain it, traditional pollsters (he calls them “dinosaurs”) are paralyzed by “Social desirability bias”: the tendency of respondents to say what they think an interviewer wants to hear, not what they really believe. In Trump’s America, he says, that problem has gotten worse.
“I just think that people are not what they say they are, ever,” Cahaly said in a recent phone interview from Atlanta, where she lives. “We cannot eliminate the social desirability bias, we can only minimize it.”
Four years ago, he approached this by asking people who they would support for president and who they thought was their neighbors would support. This year, he said, he is using other means to achieve the same result.
But it is not saying what they are. Mr. Cahaly gives almost no real explanation of his voting methodology; the methods page on Trafalgar’s website contains what looks like a vague advertisement for its services and explains that its surveys actively address social desirability bias, without giving details on how. It says it uses a combination of text messages, emails and phone calls, some automated and some by live callers, to reach an accurate representation of the electorate.
Conventional pollsters, using widely effective and long-proven methods to obtain a representative sample, are not buying it. Furthermore, if there was ever a “timid Trump supporter,” someone reluctant to admit that he plans to vote for president, that species has virtually become extinct during Trump’s raucous presidency, he said. Daniel Cox, a conservative American Enterprise Institute polling and opinion expert.
“People don’t seem embarrassed to support Mr. Trump,” Cox said. In the past four years, studies seeking to quantify the so-called “shy Trump” effect in polls have generally found little evidence to support it.
Late last month, FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver got his hands on the crossed tabs of a Michigan Trafalgar poll that was still in progress. It found that more than a quarter of Democrats and Republicans expected to vote for the other party’s nominee, so out of line with almost every other poll that Silver called the numbers “just insane.”
Mr Cahaly, of course, does not need the skepticism of the experts. He doesn’t seem to care if he’s adhering to the best practices of the American Association for Public Opinion Research, the trade organization that sets the standards, any more than Trump says he cares whether America’s NATO allies respect him.
Among his fellow pollsters, the main stumbling block is Cahaly’s lack of transparency about his methods.
Josh Pasek, a professor of communications, data and political science at the University of Michigan, said that without an idea of the methods the company uses to reach respondents, you can’t trust the numbers.
“It is tremendously inappropriate not to tell me, not only what modes you use to extract your sample, but how you did it specifically,” he said. His rule of thumb: “If someone is not transparent, it can generally be assumed that they suck.
There’s something undeniably tantalizing about the story of a Southern pollster who broke the rules and took a fresh approach to 2016 and proved all the big box stores wrong. Born in Georgia and raised in upstate South Carolina by a banker and teacher, Cahaly developed an obsession with politics as a child and majored in it at the University of South Carolina. He soon fell under the wing of pollster Rod Shealy, an acolyte to Republican strategist Lee Atwater, and eventually founded his own company.
Named after a battle in the Napoleonic Wars when the British navy returned French and Spanish ships on the high seas, Trafalgar, which he runs alone, has been conducting surveys on behalf of clients since 2006.
Most of Trafalgar’s polls are conducted for conservative and Republican clients, though, in another slight of traditional standards, it has not reliably revealed when the polls are paid for by partisan interests.
In 2010, Mr. Cahaly was arrested and taken to court for violating a law against the use of automated calling machines, known as robocalls, to conduct surveys. The charges against him were eventually dropped, and he later successfully sued a state law enforcement agency, causing the ban on robocalls in South Carolina to be declared unconstitutional.
Mr. Cahaly said he was doing legitimate polls, aimed at truly understanding voters’ opinions and getting what he called “accurate” results. During the 2016 Republican primary, it was early to detect a surge of enthusiasm from many working-class voters who had long felt alienated from politics and helped fuel Trump’s rise.
“I kept getting these stories about people showing up to vote and they didn’t know how to use the voting machines, they hadn’t voted in so long,” Cahaly said. So he started researching who those people might be and used the data available online to create a list of roughly 50 lifestyle characteristics, including, for example, whether they had a fishing license, to identify the type of unsubscribe voters. participation that were resulting en masse. He used that data to make sure he was reaching the right types of respondents when polling the voter archive. before the general elections.
In 2018, Cahaly again built up a successful track record in the Senate and Governor elections, including polls that correctly foreshadowed the victories of Ron DeSantis and Rick Scott in Florida.
This year, he has continued to see strong support for Trump among these voters, and he believes other pollsters are again underestimating his importance. Among Cahaly’s theories is that it takes five times more calls for a conservative voter to complete a poll than for a liberal one. Others in the field say they find no evidence to support this in their own work.
But Cahaly insists it is presumptuous for pollsters to assume they are drawing a representative sample of voters simply because they adhere to the scientific method. It goes back to the political division of the country and how unwilling Americans are today to communicate with each other through the gap of suspicion. In a sense, he has positioned himself as a bard of Trumpism, giving voice to a silent majority, or at least a majority in the Electoral College, who know that the elites consider their views deplorable and therefore not them. will express freely. anyone.
“Lee Atwater insisted to everyone around me that you have to get out of the head of the politicians and get into the head of Joe Six-Pack,” Cahaly said. What do average people think? And to do that I like to talk to average people. I like to follow up on voting calls and chat with people for 30 minutes. “
Mr. Cahaly does not feel the need to reveal his techniques, despite almost universal doubt about his work from his peers. “I’ve already given enough away; I’m not giving away more, ”he said, arguing that it had been a mistake to even tell the public about his“ neighbor question, ”which some other companies have since adopted in their own polls.
“I think we’ve developed something that is very different from what other people do, and I’m not really interested in telling people how we do it,” he said. “Just judge if we get it right.”
