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.

[Fancyarcher]

I do think there's an argument that Republican polling in general, not just in New York made Democrats think they were in much greater danger then they actually turned out, creating this  perception of the "Red Wave", a reverse of 2020.

Heck a lot of the Democrats spending into the final weeks suggested that they thought that they were about to get creamed, they even spent some money on protecting Murray. Didn't quite work out that way.

New York was like that on steroids. The biggest difference between New York and the other more "made up polls" was probably a combination of complaceny, and statewide issues.

[ProgressiveModerate]

This is an interesting question and I think extends beyond just NY and extends to races like WA-Sen and CO-Sen.

I think if you actually want to be tactical with this strategy, you'd want to release your polls slightly later than Trafalgar did. The influx of close R leaning NY polls started around early September which gave Hochul some time to respond and probably solidified partisanship a bit just now that many saw the race on the map.

I think the bigger way in which polling sort of screwed things up was in the House where Democrats triaged a lot of House races that in hindsight they really shouldn't have. At least Rs wasted their money on WA and CO-Sen lol.

[Fancyarcher]

This is an interesting question and I think extends beyond just NY and extends to races like WA-Sen and CO-Sen.

I think if you actually want to be tactical with this strategy, you'd want to release your polls slightly later than Trafalgar did. The influx of close R leaning NY polls started around early September which gave Hochul some time to respond and probably solidified partisanship a bit just now that many saw the race on the map.

I think the bigger way in which polling sort of screwed things up was in the House where Democrats triaged a lot of House races that in hindsight they really shouldn't have. At least Rs wasted their money on WA and CO-Sen lol.

Arizona's a good example of this. In normal circumstances, there's no way that O'Halleran would be favored in Arizona 1, especially with it being redrawn to be a bit red, but Democrats really favored protecting incumbents above anything else, so money was spent there. There was also some internal polling that showed O'Halleran to be in much better shape, that turned out to be inaccurate. 

Turns out that the 2nd and 5th were way more competitive, and with more money and hindsight, they could have been Democrat victories. Alas!

[ProgressiveModerate]

This is an interesting question and I think extends beyond just NY and extends to races like WA-Sen and CO-Sen.

I think if you actually want to be tactical with this strategy, you'd want to release your polls slightly later than Trafalgar did. The influx of close R leaning NY polls started around early September which gave Hochul some time to respond and probably solidified partisanship a bit just now that many saw the race on the map.

I think the bigger way in which polling sort of screwed things up was in the House where Democrats triaged a lot of House races that in hindsight they really shouldn't have. At least Rs wasted their money on WA and CO-Sen lol.

Arizona's a good example of this. In normal circumstances, there's no way that O'Halleran would be favored in Arizona 1, especially with it being redrawn to be a bit red, but Democrats really favored protecting incumbents above anything else, so money was spent there. There was also some internal polling that showed O'Halleran to be in much better shape, that turned out to be inaccurate. 

Turns out that the 2nd and 5th were way more competitive, and with more money and hindsight, they could have been Democrat victories. Alas!

Just for reference AZ district numbers changes. O' Halleran is now in district 2 which became a Trump district with redistricting. AZ-01 and 6 were the ones that ended up being close and in hindsight where Dems should've invested more money.

I do agree though one of my biggest annoyances this entire cycle was Dems spending tons of money to protect incumbents, including those who were probably already pretty safe (Greg Stanton in AZ-04) or facing really uphill climbs like (AZ-02). The fact they triaged races like CA-27 in a Biden + 12(!) seat is really angering. In the end, they narrowly won some races where they barely invested like NM-02 and CO-08 but they also narrowly lost quite a lot that were probably winnable.

On the R side, they just seemed like they screwed up a bunch of races with terrible candidates, and wasted too much money in races they were probably never winning than investing it in the places that were most important to winning a House and/or Senate majority. They had less of a pro-incumbent spending bias though, in large part because they didn't have as many vulnerable incumbents to defend.

[Amenhotep Bakari-Sellers]

The 20 pt drubbing of Rs in NY is over but Gillibrand not HOCHUL is on the ballot and Biden right now it's 47/40 Biden over Trump, but Trump is popular in NY, he is from NY and he is popular in TX, all Es need to jet the H next time is 4/4 and Haheem Jeffries is now Minority Leader

[Duke of York]

The 20 pt drubbing of Rs in NY is over but Gillibrand not HOCHUL is on the ballot and Biden right now it's 47/40 Biden over Trump, but Trump is popular in NY, he is from NY and he is popular in TX, all Es need to jet the H next time is 4/4 and Haheem Jeffries is now Minority Leader

I have doubts about this. You can't take one election and call it a trend. By this logic the close election in  the Illinois  governor election in 2010 and subsequent loss four years later was a trend in addition to losses in the state legislature. The state went back to form in 2018 and hasn't looked back.