Looks Like a Horse Race
by James A. Bacon
For political junkies, opinion polls are intellectual junk food: nutritionally worthless but hard to resist. My colleague Steve Haner, who is far better informed on such matters than I, dismisses college polls as total… er… garbage. Regardless, the latest poll of Virginians by Mary Washington University does make interesting reading.
Top of line finding: Democrat Abigail Spanberger and Republican Winsome Sears are tied with 39% support each from 1,000 Virginia residents polled in a gubernatorial match-up.
Also: 47% of likely voters would cast their presidential ballot for Kamala Harris and 46% for Donald Trump (with a 4.1% margin of error). More evidence that Virginia, once thought to be a gimme for Democrats, is in play.
You can take those results to the bank… if you happen to believe that the Virginians responding to the poll are a representative sample of the electorate: 34% Republican and 32% Democrat.
More self-identified Republicans in Virginia than Democrats? I wonder what friend Haner would say about that.
Whatever the case, Tim Kaine, the incumbent Democrat, maintains a wide lead over the lesser-known Republican Hung Cao — 45% to 38%.
By race, the sample was 68% White, 19% Black, 2% Asian and 9% other. (Apparently, ethnic identity as Hispanic or non-Hispanic was not asked.)
Another interesting breakdown was by political philosophy. Twenty-six percent of those polled described themselves as liberal or very liberal, 34% as conservative or very conservative, and 34% as moderate. Those numbers are somewhat helpful, but they do not distinguish between fiscal/economic conservatives and cultural conservatives. As the Republican Party becomes more culturally conservative but less fiscally/economically conservative, the ideological label tells us less than it once did. What the poll does reliably reveal is that Virginia has a large potential swing vote: the one-third of the electorate identifying as moderate.
Perhaps a better indicator than ideology is the issue that Virginians rate as the most important to them. The economy/jobs issue tops the list at 20%, with inflation close behind at 19%. That would tend to favor Republicans at the national level but give them less of a boost at the state level where government is not viewed as a key driver of economic performance. “Threats to democracy” (cited as the top issue by 19%) favors the Dems also at the national level, while immigration (13%) favors the GOP. When asked about abortion — a state-level issue — 57% of Virginians said it should be legal in all or most cases, while 37% responded that it should be illegal. Advantage: Democrats.
Another variable: voters are much happier with the job that Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin is doing (46% approve, 34% disapprove) than the job that President Joe Biden is doing (37% approve, 53% disapprove).
Sears gets high marks for her job performance (34% approve, 19% disapprove), but a huge percentage (47%) doesn’t know or can’t say. She still has a big job to do introducing herself to Virginians. (The poll did not ask the group to rate Spanberger who, presumably, is not well known outside her congressional district.)
For what it’s worth, Attorney General Jason Miyares also gets favorable ratings (32% approve, 19% disapprove) with nearly half (48%) saying they don’t know. Looks like he has a lock on the AG’s office next year.
I suspect the poll has over-sampled Republican-leaning members of the public and that the results are skewed commensurately, and wrongly, in favor of Republican politicians. But I could very well be wrong. The nation is undergoing a political realignment. The GOP under Trump is becoming the party of the working people, many of whom once were Democrats. Democrats are evolving into the party of the educated classes, especially college-educated women, many of whom once were Republican soccer moms.
So, throw out the old rules of thumb. Anything is possible.