A right wing pollster claimed today that Washington’s 2022 contest for United States Senate is “a surprisingly close race” based on a single finding from a survey it conducted last week that dubiously puts Republican Senate hopeful Tiffany Smiley within three points of Democratic incumbent Patty Murray.
The survey, by Trafalgar Group, is uncorroborated by any other public opinion research and is contradicted by the results of last month’s Top Two, an actual election in which almost two million Washingtonians cast ballots.
Trafalgar found Murray at 49.2% and Smiley at 46.3%, with a mere 4.5% undecided. The sample consists of 1,087 likely general election voters, interviewed from August 30th through yesterday, September 1st.
Just half a month ago, in the initial round of Washington’s two-part general election, Murray received 52.22% of the vote against Smiley and sixteen other challengers. Smiley, meanwhile, received 33.69% of the vote.
The total vote received by candidates identifying themselves in some form or fashion as Republicans was 41.47%, while the total vote received by Murray and other candidates identifying themselves as Democrats was 55.36%. That is typical of the split we usually see between groups of candidates professing an affiliation with the major parties in Washington State in a post-2016 Top Two election.
The second and final round will most likely consist of an electorate that is larger, more diverse, and more Democratic, yet Trafalgar would have us believe that Murray is now crumbling while Smiley is suddenly soaring. There is no evidence whatsoever to support this contention. Trafalgar’s survey is a classic outlier.
As I say often here on The Cascadia Advocate, the key to credible, accurate polling is neutral questions asked of a representative sample.
Based on what Trafalgar published, I have serious doubts that their sample is properly representative of the likely 2022 Washington November electorate.
Remember, the gap between Murray and Smiley in the Top Two was over eighteen points, about in line with what the credible public polling conducted in the preceding month by Elway Research and SurveyUSA indicated it could be.
This survey puts Smiley’s level of support (46.3%) several percentage points above and beyond the percentage that every Republican Senate candidate combined got in the Top Two. Murray, meanwhile, is supposedly under fifty percent despite having secured more than a majority of the vote against a field of seventeen opponents as of when the election was certified on August 16th.
Sorry, Trafalgar, but that dog won’t hunt.
In the general election, there will be no names on the ballot besides Smiley and Murray. Our own most recent head-to-head poll finding, published at the beginning of June, found Murray eleven points ahead of Smiley in a hypothetical general election matchup. That was back in the spring, before Murray launched her ads, before the gutting of Roe v. Wade, and before the Top Two.
Trafalgar says on its methodology statement page that it conducts its surveys using live callers, integrated voice response, text messages, emails, and “two other proprietary digital methods we don’t share publicly,” which is a red flag.
Subjective organizations are perfectly capable of carrying out objective research, but it appears that Trafalgar’s goal here (given their decision to publish these unsupportable figures) is to bolster Smiley’s longshot candidacy, rather than making a contribution to the body of credible public opinion research in this race.
14 Comments
A 49.2 to 46.3 polling result would mean that King County was grossly undersampled. Based on recent general election results, the Democratic candidate has received between 72 and 75 percent in the state’s largest county, home to 1⁄3 of all voters statewide.
That is definitely a possibility, Jerry. Trafalgar did not release a geographic breakdown of where the respondents came from. If that were available we could use it to scrutinize their sample. But it’s suspiciously absent. Also, there’s no 2020 presidential vote breakdown in the PDF. Maybe they asked, but if they did, it was excluded from the release.
Why are you so worried about this poll? You try to say it’s uncorroborated as well, even though someone like RCP saw fit to include it in their polling average… (must not be that bad then). Trafalgar, btw, for some context, is the “right wing” poll that showed almost literally on election eve that Trump had a shot in Wisconsin and Michigan, which spurred Trump to go to those states in a last minute swing, leading to his victories in both places. Btw, it’s not the first poll to show tightening. There is another poll right before this one (look on the RCP polling aggregate) that shows that Smiley was 6% down roughly. This merely represents more tightening.
The bottom line is that you’re only upset about a poll like this if you’re worried. If it’s so obscure, then why talk about it? You talk about it because you’re afraid of the fact that Trafalgar, while not 100% accurate, has shown some level of accuracy (usually within a few points) in the past three elections. Be careful, Democrats, or you’re going to have another old, worn out versus young charismatic John James type situation on your hands.
Mark, I’ve chosen to publish your comment even though it’s loaded with incorrect assumptions, strawmen arguments, and concern trolling, because we do value dissent and welcome an exchange of ideas here at NPI.
You get points for avoiding profanity, although you failed to comply with the commenting guideline that prohibits the use of all caps, so it was necessary to edit your comment before publication (the capitalized words were converted to boldface).
Your assumption that we are “worried” or “upset” about the poll is incorrect. As I said, this poll is an outlier. We have been polling this race ourselves every few months going back to the spring of 2021, and we have consistently assessed that Tiffany Smiley has failed to put Washington in play for the Republicans.
With the Top Two election results now available, we have an even greater degree of confidence in this assessment.
The other poll “right before this one” that you refer to is also a right wing poll; it was conducted for Jim Jordan by the McLaughlin Group. Like Tiffany Smiley’s internal campaign polling from last spring, which also purported to show a tight race, it is at odds with the rest of the available body of public opinion research.
The closest Smiley was to Murray in our research was nine points, back in February. Our polling indicates Murray’s advantage has widened since then.
The critiques we publish here of the right wing are not limited to matters that we are worried about, and never have been. For instance, NPI is well known for providing the likes of Tim Eyman with vigorous, year round opposition regardless of the condition of his initiative factory. It’s part of what we do and have been doing for over twenty years.
I never said that Trafalgar’s polling was obscure. In fact, Trafalgar is a well known firm with a large social media presence. Trafalgar has over 86,000 followers on Twitter, for example. A group with that kind of audience is not obscure.
It is common for poll aggregators like RCP or FiveThirtyEight to include polls of all sorts: internal campaign polls that see a public release, mass media-commissioned polls, and polls from subjective organizations with party-aligned pollsters, such as ours. Just because a poll is included by an aggregator doesn’t make it credible.
I mentioned Tiffany Smiley’s own campaign polling earlier. That is in the FiveThirtyEight index, but doesn’t make it any more credible than Trafalgar’s survey.
Every single time Patty Murray is up, right wing concern trolls show up and make comments similar to your closing line: “Be careful, Democrats, or you’re going to have another old, worn out versus young charismatic John James type situation on your hands.” It happened in 1998, 2004, 2010, and even 2016. Now it’s happening again.
Has it occurred to you that Republicans are just bad at going up against Patty Murray? Every cycle, it seems, they underestimate her, and that works to her advantage.
Linda Smith was supposed to beat her in 1998. Didn’t happen. Then in 2004, it was gonna be George Nethercutt, who had knocked out Speaker Foley in 1994. But nope. Then in 2010, Republicans recruited Dino Rossi to challenge Murray. Again, she prevailed, and in a difficult environment for Democrats. In 2016, Chris Vance (now an independent) tried to defeat Murray, and got walloped.
Here we are in 2022 and Tiffany Smiley is running. You imply she’s charismatic. But she is running a terrible campaign. She couldn’t even tell The Seattle Times’ David Gutman what she would cut out of the federal budget despite claiming to be for reining in spending. The Smiley campaign consists mainly of boilerplate and Biden/Murray bashing. We shall see how far that gets Smiley.
Our assessment, based on the evidence: Not far. But anything can happen in politics. Unlike some, we don’t lack for imagination.
Fortunately for Democrats, Patty Murray never takes a reelection for granted.
First off, the most important poll will be in November. Why do you worry so much about a Senator who clings to privilege and benefits through five terms, and is running for a sixth? She does not live in Washington State and has not for some time. Murray and other hangers-on like her fly in the face of representational Democracy. There are far worse things that can happen to this state and nation than Smiley somehow upsetting Murray. There are two ways to get off the gravy train: To be thrown off or step off. I don’t think Murray is ever going to step off. We limited the terms of Presidents, and until we do it for representatives and especially Senators we dwell in stagnant political waters.
We aren’t worried about what is going to happen to Patty Murray, Irving. That is an incorrect presumption on your part.
You are also laughably wrong about Murray’s residence. She does live in Washington State. As a Senator, she spends plenty of time in our nation’s capital, but this Washington is where she makes her home. She is usually here on the weekends (even though it’s a long cross country flight) and during the week when the Senate is not in session.
NPI is opposed to term limits for members of Congress because imposing them could make the “revolving door” phenomenon even worse. There are more effective ways to tackle corruption and incumbency, including combating gerrymandering, adopting public campaign financing, and giving campaigns access to low cost postage and a minimum amount of free airtime on the public airwaves to get their message out.
While I would be shocked if this election stayed so close, it’s silly of you to dismiss this poll. Trafalgar has been one of the most accurate polling sites since 2016 when they were one of the few (maybe only?) one to correctly call the election for Trump.
Also, why do you feel the need to identify them as a “right wing pollster”? Other pollsters you noted were only identified by their name rather than as a liberal or independent pollster. Surely their political lean must be important as well?
Just because you don’t like the results of a particular poll, or it doesn’t match with your expectations, does not mean it must be inaccurate. It seems odd you are going so far out of your way to discredit this particular poll.
Brian, commentary on polling is standard fare for NPI’s Cascadia Advocate. Our Poll Watch series has been going for years. We publish these kinds of analyses all the time. We did not go far out of our way to create this analysis.
I mentioned in the post that subjective organizations are perfectly capable of conducting objective research. We won’t dismiss a poll merely because it happens to have been conducted by an entity whose leadership and researchers hold right wing views. But we do dismiss polling that has either loaded questions or unrepresentative samples. Trafalgar’s findings here are suspect because they are not correlated by any other credible data and because Trafalgar didn’t provide crucial information needed to critically evaluate their survey. If you look in the results PDF, you’ll see there’s no geographic breakdown, there’s no breakdown by education, and there’s no breakdown by presidential vote. That’s all very concerning.
If Trafalgar had published findings showing Patty Murray forty points ahead, that would also have been suspect. Our analysis isn’t based on whether we like or dislike what we see, it’s based on the soundness or lack thereof of the question wording, the sampling, and the methodology employed.
Of the three polling partnerships identified in the post, one has an ideological lean (NPI/PPP) and two do not (Crosscut/Elway and SurveyUSA/UW/WSU/KING5/Seattle Times). The one with the ideological lean is us. Our ideology is clear from our name: Northwest Progressive Institute. That’s not the case with Trafalgar. So it was important to mention that. Poll aggregators like FiveThirtyEight do the same thing, incidentally: they place symbols and labels next to pollsters informing readers if there is an ideological lean.
I believe I actually responded to that poll. I don’t usually respond, but when I heard Trafalager I thought it would be interesting.
If so, it was definitely a push poll asking questions like ‘Murray has supported Biden’s inflationary policies. How do you feel about her support strongly agree to strongly disagree’.
Note the single quotes to indicate that wasn’t an actual quotation.
After several such questions of the sort the poll asked who I supported for Senator.
Queue the panic…Trafalgar is out with another poll showing only a 2 or difference now. Can’t wait to hear why they are wrong again.
Nobody except for Tiffany Smiley fans is taking Trafalgar’s polling seriously, Brian.
You came back to the thread, so surely you noticed Jim Lovejoy’s comment, in which he reports he believes he was part of the sample for the last Trafalgar survey and detailed that there were a series of loaded questions in there.
That helps explain the skew of the results.
These Trafalgar polls can’t be trusted because:
Tiffany Smiley is not statistically tied with Patty Murray and no amount of garbage Trafalgar data is going to move the needle for her.
I’m not a Smiley fan…no idea who she is. I live in Ohio. I just enjoy seeing liberals freak out. And I’ll keep following the the thread until one of us is forced to admit they were wrong. Talk to you on election night.
As I mentioned back in September, we never took Trafalgar’s garbage polling seriously, Brian.
But it was important to call out Trafalgar for its bad and sloppy work.
We now have a first batch of election results. Patty Murray is up by fourteen points:
The election has been called for Murray and she will be returning to the Senate as Washington State’s senior senator.
Trafalgar’s polls in New Hampshire, New York, and other states were also way off. They were more interested in feeding a narrative than conducting legitimate research, which is a shame.
We, on the other hand, are committed to the scientific method.
Vote Smiley. Get rid of career politicians that only serve themselves.
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[…] The second was done by the Trafalgar Group, a prolific Republican pollster, and depict… — a massively different result from what pollsters not aligned with either party found back in July. […]
[…] Two Republican-aligned pollsters have recently put out data showing Smiley within single digits of Murray. This new finding from Crosscut/Elway confirms that those surveys are outliers. The Trafalgar survey, in particular, is just not credible, as I explained here on The …. […]