AJC: Pollin’ Ain’t Easy
“Math is hard.” – Barbie
Today in Journalisming(™), the Atlanta Journal-Constitution commissioned a poll about the results of the 2024 election. They then went on to write a long-form article about the poll results, going into detail on their thesis that Trump won Georgia by keeping the Republicans unified, while Democrats were less so in their support of Kamala Harris.
The only problem with this thesis is that their poll results show the exact opposite of that conclusion.
According to the AJC article, Trump won because there was less ticket-splitting (voting for a different party for president than for the rest of the ballot) among Republican voters than among Democrats. To prove this point, they commissioned a poll that showed 88% of Trump voters also voted Republican down-ballot, but only 79% of Harris voters voted Democrat down-ballot.
But it’s the down-ballot votes that generally signify party. In other words, if you voted for Trump but Democrats down-ballot, you’re much more likely to be a Democrat who flipped from Harris to Trump than a Republican who flipped on your Congressman or state representatives. And since the article is about the presidential race, it’s presidential switching that’s relevant.
This is easy to see in the graph the AJC helpfully included but apparently did not look at. The ~307k Trump voters who voted for Democrats down-ballot are likely Democrats who voted for Trump, and the ~524k Harris voters who voted for Republicans down-ballot are likely Republicans who voted for Harris.
The caption indicates that “Harris suffered more defections from Democrats”, but it’s not a defection from Harris to vote for Harris but then vote for down-ballot Republicans. Those are the defections to Harris from Republican or independent voters.
The article includes a different graph, with wildly different numbers (it’s not clear to me exactly why, but it could be that the first graph looks at people who split their votes between President and any other race, where the second is specifically about splitting the presidential and congressional races), but that one makes it even more clear: ignoring the third parties, ~149k voters voted for Harris and a Republican for Congress, while only ~85k voted for Trump and a Democrat for Congress. In either case, just under ⅔ of flippers were likely Rs who voted for Harris, and the remaining third were likely Ds who voted for Trump.
So while Trump won Georgia, it wasn’t because of the ticket-splitters, and Harris had nearly twice as many of them as Trump did.
I’m not anti-journalist in general or anti-AJC in particular, even when they do steal my ideas without accreditation. I did a number of media interviews during my days in politics, including with them, and was generally treated fairly. But I have no issues calling them out when they screw up. It seems unlikely that this article was intentionally written to deceive – presumably most AJC staff would prefer more Republican defectors than fewer – but it’s pretty bad when not one person involved in the publication of this article understood the poll they based the article on.
