Did Trafalgar set in motion a trajectory for the NY-GOV race?

[wbrocks67]

Something I've been thinking about. While we still wait for the post-mortems on polling this season (or mostly, about why the partisan polling was what it was), I do firmly believe at this point that one of the main objectives of a business like Trafalgar was simply narrative-setting and fundraising-inducing.

Simply put - Trafalgar gives you a favorable result. They were still trusted up to this point as a somewhat legitimate pollster in many circles, especially one that may produce a "real" result for Republicans compared to the "mainstream polls". This in turn gives you media coverage. It gives you something to fundraise off of. It gives you something to change the narrative about the race. "Oh wait, Zeldin may ACTUALLY have a chance here!" Same thing I think they set out to do in places like WA especially, and CO to an extent.

I ask this because up until Trafalgar's poll, most mainstream pollsters were finding Hochul doing fine. Emerson and Siena even both did a poll in late August/early September I believe that found her at about +15 in both. Now, there were still a few undecideds there, but the result was scarily similar in both.

Now, obviously Hochul behind the scenes was not doing what she needed to do. But usually people running for NY-GOV don't need to campaign that hard, so this was nothing really out of the ordinary.

Then in September, as we got the "shock polling result", suddenly Zeldin had a few bucks and he got a huge push of outside spending. In September, Zeldin was able to then throw a lot more TV ads together from himself and outside groups, and because of the shock poll and the money, he was able to create a better narrative for himself and make people - even outside mainstream publications (besides Fox, etc.) pay attention to the race. Not only that, but I think all of this culminated the Republican base in New York to actually feel like maybe they had a chance for once.

Then once we get into October, we start to see the mainstream pollsters, even among them Siena, Emerson, SurveyUSA, who had seen big Hochul leads before, suddenly finding a closer race. Zeldin is able to cash even more on all of this now because it's basically a "thing" and everyone is paying attention to it.

Now again, Hochul may have always been destined to underperform severely. And I don't think this was all due to Trafalgar. But I do think there may be something to say for narrative setting here. It certainly didn't work in WA, as hard as they tried. But in NY, there was more fertile ground for Zeldin's message to break through as well. So I do wonder if Trafalgar essentially creating a poll that gave (unknowingly) false hope to the GOP set in motion something that got way bigger.

Maybe I'm thinking too much about it, but in terms of the *goal* of Trafalgar this cycle, again, in terms of getting coverage, setting narratives in places, used as a fundraising tool, I think it was something that benefitted Zeldin greatly in NY.

I say this also because maybe you could give Trafalgar the benefit of the doubt, like oh wait maybe they WERE right in New York? How did they see this before anyone else? But I just don't believe that, considering they tried to do the *same* exact tactic in other places like WA, VT, etc, and it completely fell apart, pointing to it completely being made up. I think they took a chance on NY and essentially got lucky.