Tuesday’s election was a very good one for Democrats across the country and PPP was proud to play a role in a number of the key races across the country- and poll them pretty accurately!
-In Ohio voters established a constitutional right to abortion. We polled on this ballot question for three different clients in the last month of the campaign. Our final poll had it passing 55-38 and it passed 57-43 which makes sense because most undecideds move to ‘no’ on ballot questions.
-In Kentucky our incumbent Democratic Governor Andy Beshear got re-elected. We did work on this race over the course of the year both directly for the Governor’s campaign and for the Democratic Governors Association. Our publicly released poll on the contest had Beshear up 49-41 and we noted that most of the voters on the fence were Republicans and it would probably tighten up. He won by 5 points.
-Pennsylvania had an important State Supreme Court race. When we polled it for a client last month we found the Democratic candidate ahead by 8 points at 46-38 and it looks like his final margin of victory will be around 7 points.
There’s been a lot of attention to the New York Times polling last weekend. They have a great poll but the political world should never treat a single poll as the absolute gospel in the way it’s been doing this week.
As you can see above we’ve had a pretty good read on the world of late. And our most recent polls had Joe Biden up 4 in Michigan and Pennsylvania and 3 in Wisconsin, which would be enough to give him a majority in the Electoral College. Unreleased polling we’ve done in other key states recently has generally found a Biden-Trump rematch falling within a point or two of where it finished in 2020- at the end of the day there aren’t many minds to change on that choice!
It’s definitely going to be a close election, probably very similar to 2020 in its dynamics. But don’t let yourself despair that Trump is just going to clobber Biden, that’s not how we see the world and in most key races we’ve been seeing it pretty clearly…
