Eric Cantor’s Pollster Tries to Explain Why His Survey Showed Cantor Up 34 Points – NationalJournal.com

Eric Cantor’s pollster whiffed.

Less than a week before voters dumped the House majority leader, an internal poll for Cantor’s campaign, trumpeted to the Washington Post, showed Cantor cruising to a 34-point victory in his primary. Instead, Cantor got crushed, losing by 10 percentage points.

How did Cantor’s pollster, veteran Republican survey-taker John McLaughlin, get the historic race so terribly wrong?

It was supposed to have had a margin of error of 4.9 percentage points. The error, of course, was far larger. Statistically, polls are expected to fall outside that margin of error on 1 in 20 surveys. But in the end, it undercounted Brat’s support by about 27 percentage points and overestimated Cantor’s by 17 points. The poll was widely mocked on Twitter.

In an email to National Journal, McLaughlin, whose firm has been paid nearly $75,000 by Cantor’s campaign since 2013, offered several explanations: unexpectedly high turnout, last-minute Democratic meddling, and stinging late attacks on amnesty and immigration.

“Primary turnout was 45,000 2 years ago,” McLaughlin wrote. “This time 65,000. This was an almost 50% increase in turnout.”

Translation: McLaughlin’s estimate of who was a “likely Republican” voter was way, way off the mark. But Cantor’s total number of votes still shrunk, even as the total number of primary voters went up dramatically in 2014. He secured 37,369 primary votes in 2012 and less than 29,000 this year, with 100 percent of precincts reporting.

Meanwhile, McLaughin wrote that “attacks on immigration and amnesty charges from the right in last week hurt.”

Then McLaughlin cited the “Cooter” factor – the fact that former Rep. Ben Jones, a Georgia Democrat who played Cooter in The Dukes of Hazzard, had written an open letter urging Democrats to vote for Brat to help beat Cantor.

“Over the weekend Democrats like Ben Jones and liberal media were driving their Democratic voters on the internet into the open primary,” McLaughlin wrote. “Eric got hit from right and left. In our polls two weeks out Eric was stronger with Republicans at 70% of the vote, but running under 50% among non Republicans.”