SanAndreasX said:
Arizona is another state where most people vote by mail, thanks to the fact that the state is very sparsely populated outside of five or six urban areas. Trump is up by 2 there in overall polls, yet Gallego is up by 8 points over Kari Lake. I don't get the disconnect. The majority of voters clearly understand that Lake is not fit for office, yet they don't apply that to Trump. Lake has deliberately made herself a female carbon copy of Trump (TV personality, conspiracy theories, and baseless claims of election fraud.) She was also a frequent guest at Mar-a-Lago and received numerous Trump endorsements both in the governor's race and the Senate. She lost by a razor-thin margin to Katie Hobbs in the 2022 gubernatorial election and is getting curb-stomped by Gallego after two years of claiming widespread voter fraud. Yet they still vote Trump. |
I've thought about that and here are a couple of suggestions.
1. The polls are wrong. We know that there are a lot of Republican pollsters putting out a lot of Presidential polls, but not so much in the Senate races. If we assume that the presidential polls are being skewed, or at least less skewed, then we would expect to see Democrats looking better in those races. It is worth noting that as far as I can tell in the 2020 election the results for the Senate races almost all were very close to the presidential results. When there was a difference, the Senate candidates generally outperformed Trump from what I can tell.
2. The second hypothesis is that it is easier to fool people than to convince them that they've been fooled. Once people have voted for Trump, in some cases twice, they feel obligated to defend that position. Even if they otherwise would be opposed to the Maga bullshit, they just can't admit they got conned, so they rationalize. But they don't feel like they are committed to the Senate candidates in the same way.
Time will tell. But I feel like the Senate race numbers and the presidential numbers cannot both be right.