The low-propensity Trump voters thing is a meme that has been debunked. Youngkin's probably not going to win, but this race will be a lot closer than it should be.
It is not a meme and it has absolutely not been debunked. If anything it’s closer to the opposite; it’s been decisively proven. In almost every single off-year election since 2016, Democrats have if anything overperformed polls. Including in the 2021 GA senate races and CA governor recall after Biden was elected, and in the LA and KY 2019 gov races when Trump personally begged voters to vote R in these deep red states, and the actual 2017 VA gov race. While it was only in 2016 and 2020, when Trump himself was on the ballot, when Republicans significantly overperformed polls.
Common sense, logic, and data all thus point to the conclusion that Trump’s presence on the ballot drives out turnout among voters who otherwise won’t show up for Generic Rs, or even Trumpy and Trump-backed Rs. Now he’s outright telling these people not to vote because he’s still butthurt he lost last year. (Which probably killed the GOP in GA in January too by the way.) What the hell do you think is gonna happen as a result of all that?
Not to mention the fact that the highest propensity voters (educated whites) who historically and presently are the ones most likely to show up in off-year elections have switched to the Dems in droves. This makes the pollsters current likely voter screens, overcompensating massively for their 2020 miss, laughably bad because they are assuming the electorate now is going to be a combination of the Trump only voters they missed last time and suburban white Republicans from 2010 and 2014. Except most of the former won’t vote without Trump, and most of the latter are now Dems.
This ridiculous assumption caused them to be off catastrophically in CA, a polling miss far worse than their 2020 miss, and I am pretty confident that will happen again here. The RV results will likely be more accurate than the LV results for most of these polls, just like in CA. (VA has also taken steps to make it easier to vote by the way, even if not to the same extent as CA mailing ballots to everyone.)
