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Friday, September 2nd, 2022

Poll Watch: Trafalgar tries to bolster Tiffany Smiley’s longshot challenge to Patty Murray

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.

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14 Comments

  1. 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 13 of all vot­ers statewide.

    # by Jerry Michael Jones :: September 3rd, 2022 at 9:17 AM
    • 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.

      # by Andrew Villeneuve :: September 3rd, 2022 at 12:22 PM
  2. 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.

    # by Mark A. :: September 3rd, 2022 at 2:02 PM
    • 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.

      # by Andrew Villeneuve :: September 3rd, 2022 at 5:02 PM
  3. 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.

    # by Irving Warner :: September 6th, 2022 at 12:37 AM
    • 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.

      # by Andrew Villeneuve :: September 9th, 2022 at 5:43 PM
  4. 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.

    # by Brian W :: September 8th, 2022 at 10:42 AM
    • 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.

      # by Andrew Villeneuve :: September 9th, 2022 at 5:34 PM
  5. 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.

    # by Jim Lovejoy :: September 11th, 2022 at 10:31 AM
  6. 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.

    # by Brian W :: September 26th, 2022 at 11:02 AM
    • 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: 

      • Their results are con­tra­dict­ed by the body of avail­able evi­dence, includ­ing very fresh research. Elway, which isn’t aligned with any par­ty, just found Pat­ty Mur­ray thir­teen points ahead of Tiffany Smi­ley, which match­es the gap between all the Demo­c­ra­t­ic and Repub­li­can Sen­ate can­di­dates in the August Top Two election.
      • They aren’t releas­ing break­downs of who took their polls by edu­ca­tion, loca­tion, or 2020 pres­i­den­tial vote, which is a red flag.
      • They are not prop­er­ly trans­par­ent about how they’re con­duct­ing their polls… for instance, they claim to use “pro­pri­etary dig­i­tal meth­ods we don’t share pub­licly” for sur­vey­ing peo­ple in addi­tion to emails and texts. Anoth­er red flag.

      Tiffany Smi­ley is not sta­tis­ti­cal­ly tied with Pat­ty Mur­ray and no amount of garbage Trafal­gar data is going to move the nee­dle for her.

      # by Andrew Villeneuve :: September 26th, 2022 at 11:17 AM
  7. 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.

    # by Brian W :: September 26th, 2022 at 7:13 PM
    • 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: 

      Pat­ty Murray
      980,199votes (56.92%)

      Tiffany Smi­ley
      738,618 votes (42.89%)

      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.

      # by Andrew Villeneuve :: November 9th, 2022 at 1:44 AM
  8. Vote Smi­ley. Get rid of career politi­cians that only serve themselves.

    # by Mario A. :: September 28th, 2022 at 11:13 AM

2 Pings

  1. […] 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. […]

  2. […] 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 …. […]

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