Outside of Vermont, which Haley appears to have won, Haley is getting beaten just about everywhere tonight. That’s 100% expected. But we are seeing that polling seemed to dramatically overstate Trump’s margins. So for instance 538 had Trump up 49 points over Haley in Virginia. But it looks like it will be just under 30 points. Needless to say these are still very lopsided defeats. But that’s also a pretty big polling miss.
Some people I’m seeing are ascribing that to a huge amount of strategic voting by independents and Biden-supporting Dems. So it’s interesting but doesn’t mean anything. I’m not sure I totally buy that. I’m not quite sure what it means. But I don’t think I buy that it means nothing. The number of people who are willing to strategic vote is never very high. It’s hard enough to get people to vote at all, let alone vote to make a point for election observers or to own the other parties frontrunners. If that’s what it is I would say that it suggests a truly extreme amount of mobilization on the anti-Trump side.
I suspect a lot of these are either conservative-leaning independents who are voting for Haley but won’t vote for Trump in the general and true independents (move back and forth between parties) and are making a statement. Neither side can win with only its own registered partisans. You need a lot of independents. I’m going to wait until all the numbers are in to decide just what I make of this. But the mix of significant anti-Trump vote and in many cases big polling errors just don’t square with writing it off.