The Democratic National Convention is now in full swing. If history is our guide, when the four-day infomercial is over Kamala Harris will enjoy a bounce in the polls – potentially opening up as much as a 5-point lead nationally over Donald Trump. Political pundits will lap up the information and spew it back to us as if it actually matters.
The reality is different. Summertime polling leads are meaningless – just ask President Michael Dukakis. Seventy-five days is an eternity in modern campaign terms. Anything could happen between now and November 5 – as the last 30 days has demonstrated starkly.
Donald Trump also has a history of outperforming his polls. In 2016, he outperformed the Election Day polling by 1.1 percentage points. In 2020, that number was even larger. In the final vote, Biden’s win margin over Trump was 2.7 percentage points less than the Real Clear Politics polling average predicted. Trump’s outperformance versus the predicted 538 polling average was even greater at 4 full percentage points.
Compounding the uncertainty posed by the enduring presence of “hidden Trump voters” is the unpredictability of how, in the privacy of the voting booth, Americans will react to the first woman of color nominated for president by a major political party. Those who harbor prejudices do not always share them with pollsters.
But what if there are also “hidden Harris voters”? What if there is a large bloc of voters who are invisible to pollsters but will vote for Kamala Harris? The August 2022 primary from my home state of Kansas suggests that there might be.
First, some context. In 2019, the Kansas Supreme Court ruled that the Kansas Bill of Rights preserved the right of a woman to terminate a pregnancy. For the pro-life community, this was a real setback. While Roe v. Wade was still the law of the land, the Kansas Supreme Court called into question whether the various abortion regulations that had been implemented in Kansas were constitutional.
To invalidate the decision of the Kansas Supreme Court, pro-life advocates worked with the leaders of the Kansas legislature to get a constitutional amendment placed on the ballot for the August 2022 primary. Labeled the “Value them Both” amendment by its proponents, the amendment would grant the Kansas legislature the right to regulate abortion access in the state.
Placing the vote on the primary ballot was deliberate. In a mid-summer primary, the pro-life community believed it would have a turnout advantage. If it passed, the amendment would have preserved the status quo of regulations that survived constitutional scrutiny under Roe. Notably, however, if Roe were overturned, the amendment would allow the legislature to ban abortion, even in the case of rape or incest.
The pro-life community was not only well-organized, but also highly confident. They were operating in a conservative state and one with strong pro-life credentials – Wichita was the unofficial capital of the anti-abortion movement – and, moreover, they took heart from polling showing that the amendment would pass and become enshrined in the Kansas Constitution. But it didn’t happen that way. Just seven weeks before the vote in Kansas, the Dobbs decision came down. What started out as an amendment that would have preserved the pre-2019 regulatory status quo turned into a likely pathway to ban abortion altogether in Kansas.
In one fell swoop, the primary vote became a bellwether for how Americans felt about the Supreme Court’s overturning some 50 years of settled law. It was the first such vote in the nation. While the Dobbs decision changed the calculus, many pre-election polls still seemed to indicate the outcome was a coin flip. Evidence of the tight projected vote was abundant, but nowhere was it more obvious than on the Kansas governor’s social media accounts. As a Democrat running for reelection in a red state, she was paralyzed by the uncertain outcome. Apparently, not wanting to be on the wrong side of a statewide vote, the governor’s pages were silent about the assault on women’s rights.
When the votes were ultimately counted, the results were shocking. Even without the full-throated opposition of the state’s leading Democrat, Kansas voters rejected the amendment by an 18-point margin. When the dust cleared, 936,664 Kansans cast their vote in the amendment battle, roughly 185,000 more than those who bothered to vote in the gubernatorial primaries. In fact, only 52% of the voters who voted against the constitutional amendment voted in the Democratic primaries – meaning a large percentage of the “no” votes came from Republicans and independents.
Many of those who voted in that primary won’t have their preferences registered in this year’s presidential election polls because they didn’t bother to vote in the last general election. Pollsters generally only poll “likely” voters. But they don’t always just take the voter’s word for it. Many reputable pollsters start with a voter file that only includes voters who voted in the prior general election – effectively ignoring the preferences of those without a history of voting recently.
That approach to polling, however, would ignore a large number of voters who cast ballots in the Kansas primary. In fact, almost 14% of the 2022 primary voters didn’t vote in the 2022 general election, while over 3% of those who voted in the Kansas primary hadn’t voted before or after the vote on August 2, 2022. It’s this 14% of voters, properly activated, who constitute the potential “hidden Harris voter” universe. In the context of what is certain to be a tight election, those voters could represent the difference between winning and losing in November.
