Super voters are the ones who count most in polls
Ask most people what a poll is for and they’ll say it tells you who’s winning. In a low-turnout election, that’s the easy part. The hard part — the part that decides whether the poll is any good — is figuring out who’s going to vote. Get the electorate right and the question nearly answers itself. Get it wrong, and the most careful arithmetic in the world won’t save you.
The people who tell a pollster they’ll vote and the people who show up aren’t the same crowd, and the smaller the turnout, the wider that gap grows. That’s the real work of polling a runoff, and in Alabama this year it’s never mattered more.
The numbers tell the story. Alabama Republicans have been walking down a staircase all year. The May 19 primary drew about 23% of registered voters. The June 16 runoff pulled fewer than 11%. Two weeks ago, a special congressional primary in four districts drew 5.24%. Ask yourself who’s still standing at the bottom of that staircase, because those are the people choosing our nominees.
They’re what I call super voters — the Alabamians who turn out when almost no one else does. You find them not by asking, but by looking at what they’ve already done: They voted in the last primary, and the one before that, and the one before that.
Which brings me to my own numbers. On May 28, The Alabama Poll surveyed 600 likely runoff voters. The topline in the U.S. Senate race showed Jared Hudson ahead of Barry Moore by nine and a half points. But the topline isn’t the whole story, and that story can hide behind a boatload of numbers.
When I sorted the same respondents by how reliably they vote, the race changed shape. Among those who merely said they were going to vote — stated intention — Hudson led by about nine, mirroring the topline. But among the three-for-three super voters — demonstrated behavior — the race was a dead heat, inside a single point. Among voters 65 and older, the most reliable age group in any runoff, Moore was already ahead.
The topline said one thing. The numbers in the crosstabs that described the people most certain to show up said another.
Moore won the runoff, 55.8 to 44.2. Seems like it should have been a no-brainer, doesn’t it?
I want to be precise, because it’s not that my poll was wrong. The poll saw this clearly — the reliable-voter signal was right there in my own crosstabs. The pull, always, is to trust the topline that averages everyone — they said they’d vote, after all — over the smaller number of those who actually show up. With my Senate call from the May poll, I chose poorly. A projection is only as good as the analysis a pollster brings to that choice.
There’s real value in understanding these super voters, even in — maybe especially in — their small numbers. They decide nominations that shape Alabama for years. Identifying them isn’t guesswork; it’s the patient work of matching demonstrated turnout history to a likely voter model, cycle after cycle, and resisting the temptation to let a comfortable topline stand in for that work.
The principle isn’t complicated, and it isn’t new. In a low-turnout race, the voters who’ve shown up before are a better guide than the ones who only say they will, and when the full sample and those reliable voters disagree, the reliable voters are usually closer to the truth.
The deepest problem in polling has never been the math. It’s assuming the electorate you expect instead of measuring the one that’ll turn out.
In an election decided by one voter in 10 — or one in 20 — the whole game is figuring out who walks through the door. Get that right, and the arithmetic takes care of itself.
Michael T. Lowry is the founder of The Alabama Poll and Backstop Strategies, a Washington, D.C.-based government affairs firm. A native Alabamian, he has spent more than 30 years in politics and government, most recently as chief of staff to U.S. Rep. Robert Aderholt.
