‘Shy Harris Voters’ and other 2024 polling wild cards

The effort to encourage “shy Harris voters’’ has caught Trump’s attention.

Your vote is secret. No one will know how you marked your ballot. What happens in the voting booth stays in the voting booth.

Those messages from the actress Julia Roberts, in a widely noted TV ad, and other prominent Kamala Harris supporters are aimed at giving women permission to back the vice president without telling family members or neighbours who may want them to vote for Donald Trump.

But what if these voters are also hiding their intention from pollsters? If polls are failing to reflect the true votes of some women – who account for more than half the electorate – then they may be masking a slight advantage for Harris in their reports that the campaigns are heading into Election Day in a dead-even tie.

That is only one way the polls may be missing support for one candidate or another. Here are a few trends the polls may not be able to detect.

Kamala Harris walks off the stage during a rally in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Picture: Getty Images via AFP.

‘Shy Harris voters’

When pollsters set out to explain how they missed Trump’s Electoral College victory in 2016, and their underestimation of Trump’s strength once again in 2020, one thought was that some of the candidate’s supporters were wary of civic institutions and so were masking their true voting intentions. These were dubbed “shy Trump voters.” The opposite may now be the case, some campaign strategists believe. Pressure in some communities to support Trump is so strong that voters who don’t back him, particularly women, may be the ones who this year are hesitant to reveal their true intentions.

“I don’t have direct evidence of this, but in this highly contentious environment, it’s not implausible for there to be a significant percentage of women voters who are not just hiding their intended Harris vote from their significant others, but also from pollsters,” said Mark Putnam, a Democratic ad-maker. He thought that social pressures could possibly cause some men to mask their voting intention, as well.

The effort to encourage “shy Harris voters” has caught Trump’s attention. On Saturday, he criticised the ad narrated by Roberts, which was produced by the group Vote Common Good.

Roberts says in the ad: “You can vote any way you want, and no one will ever know,” as two women are shown marking their ballots for Harris despite their husbands’ apparent expectations that they would back Trump.

It is a message amplified by other Harris supporters, including former Rep. Liz Cheney, a Republican. The belief that women may be masking their vote comes in part from the experience of Democrats talking to voters at their front doors, a Harris campaign pollster said. Some canvassers noticed that a husband sometimes wouldn’t let them talk to his wife, the pollster said.

It is also possible that polls are understating Trump’s support once again. One possible sign of this came from a set of New York Times/Siena College surveys of the battleground states released Sunday, which found that white Democrats were likelier than white Republicans to participate in the polls. While statistical adjustments could address the imbalance, the Times said the finding could signal that polls aren’t capturing Trump’s full support.

Donald Trump takes the stage during a campaign rally in Reading, Pennsylvania. Picture: Getty Images via AFP.

Same-day registration voters

Many pollsters build their surveys on interviews with registered voters – those whose names appear on the voter lists maintained by each state. But several battleground states allow people to register and vote on Election Day, among them Wisconsin, Michigan and Nevada. North Carolina allows same-day registration during the early-voting period.

Pollsters have likely missed the chance to talk with these late-deciding voters, because they weren’t placed on the registered-voter list until the final day.

In 2020, some 68,000 people registered to vote in Wisconsin on Election Day, according to L2, a nonpartisan firm that collects the voter lists from each state. That number far exceeds President Biden’s winning margin in Wisconsin of about 20,700 votes.

In Michigan, some 14,600 registered on Election Day in 2020. In Nevada, nearly 10,000 registered. Both states are considered toss-ups in this year’s election.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. speaks ahead of Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Picture: AFP.

Robert F. Kennedy voters

Pollsters always believed that surveys early in the campaign season overstated support for Robert F. Kennedy Jr.and other independent or third-party candidates. History shows that voters often “park their vote” with one of those candidates while they consider their choices, then gravitate to one of the major party candidates, who have a real shot at winning.

As predicted, support for these alternative candidates has dwindled from the 15 per cent The Wall Street Journal found in its March survey of battleground states, which included 11 per cent for Kennedy. But the final level of support for Kennedy and others could be meaningful in such a close election.

A poll of Iowa released on Saturday confirmed that Kennedy is still drawing votes – some 3 per cent in the state – even though he has abandoned his presidential campaign. That is a worrying sign for Republicans, as many polls this year have found that he draws more votes away from Trump than from Harris when he is offered as an option.

Kennedy remains on the ballot not only in Iowa but also in Michigan and Wisconsin. The Supreme Court last week turned aside his own last-minute request to strike his name from the ballot in those two states.

One question for the Trump campaign is whether its candidate, by saying he would give Kennedy a role in his potential administration, has hurt himself by creating a platform for Kennedy to draw media and public attention to himself. Kennedy, a noted antivaccine advocate, has counselled a war on highly processed foods and most recently said that Trump, if re-elected, would advise public water systems to ban fluoride.

Green Party nominee Jill Stein is on the ballot in many battleground states and could draw support away from Harris. She isn’t on the ballot in Iowa and so wasn’t tested in the poll of that state.

Polls have given a mixed picture of whether alternative candidates in the aggregate hurt Harris or Trump more. An NBC News survey released on Sunday suggested, tentatively, that Harris could be hurt more. It found the two candidates tied among registered voters nationally on a head-to-head ballot, but Trump moved to a 1-point lead when independent and third-party candidates were options.

Dow Jones