Chapman Rackaway: Why was polling off in state races?

August’s primary elections in Kansas strongly suggested an electorate in an angry mood, ready to boot incumbent candidates. An unknown GOP gubernatorial candidate who spent pennies on the dollar took 37 percent of the vote. Subsequent polls were no kinder, showing both Gov. Sam Brownback and Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., in deep trouble.

But Brownback and Roberts won, despite close races. Every other federal and statewide Republican in Kansas cruised to victory, and Republicans even picked up more seats in the Kansas House.

Why was the polling off? One reason is that polls have a tougher time predicting close races, and having multiple close races may have driven uncertainty and electoral volatility. Also, new developments in campaigns have made polls less relevant and helpful in determining winners prior to votes being cast.

The television age encouraged candidates and parties to mobilize segments of the population instead of the local mobilization that hallmarked the first century and a half of American politicking. Since 2004, when Republicans amassed a national voter database to identify groups of voters they could activate, local mobilization has returned to prominence as a vitally important element of winning elections.

Over the past 10 years, data-driven efforts at individual-level mobilization have been adopted by political electioneering organizations. Those organizations, and notably the Obama presidential campaigns, have refined and improved their voter databases since 2004.

Kansas Republicans got serious about data in 2010. Exit polls for 2010 and 2012 showed GOP turnout at near-record rates of 55 percent. For the 2014 campaign, Kansas Democrats also got serious about their database use. Democratic efforts at individual-level voter mobilization may have blunted the GOP advantage, as the percentage of Republican turnout in 2014 dropped to 49 percent of all voters.

The key to understanding why election returns looked so different from the polls may lie in the electorate itself.

Fort Hays State University’s Docking Institute of Public Affairs conducts an annual statewide poll, breaking down partisan identification into seven categories. Since 2010, the Kansas electorate has become slightly more volatile, and that volatility likely explains the changing poll results and their variation from the results of the 2014 elections.

Independents and those only casually leaning toward one of the major parties have increased from two-fifths to half of the Kansas voting public. Independents have been shown, according to the book “The Persuadable Voter,” to be more susceptible to campaign messages and volatile in their vote decisions.

As the campaigns ramped up, persuadable voters took in those messages and, based on their evaluation at the moment, could have supported one candidate one week and another the next.

Close races and skewed polls made predicting winners difficult, but late-race individual mobilization of an uncertain electorate made for an election full of surprises.

This story was originally published November 21, 2014 at 6:02 PM with the headline "Chapman Rackaway: Why was polling off in state races?."