And on that front, there’s not a lot of ambiguity: The campaigns mostly sorted out what was working and what wasn’t during the general election. So they say they are relying less on polling over all, and more on simply turning out voters.
Robert Cahaly, a Republican pollster based in Atlanta, said the battle lines were pretty clearly drawn by now. “All the labeling that the Democrats think hurts them, Republicans will be smart to be using that in this race,” he said. “Cancel culture, ‘defund the police’ — all that stuff helped beat Democrats” in down-ballot elections last month.
Republicans say they are encouraged by the fact that on Nov. 3 — what political observers winkingly call “the only poll that matters” — Mr. Perdue beat Mr. Ossoff by nearly two percentage points. If all the same voters turned out on Jan. 5, he would need to pick up just a tiny fraction of those who cast ballots for the Libertarian candidate, Shane Hazel, to win.
But that’s not how runoffs work. A significant share of those who voted third-party probably won’t come back in January, and neither will a chunk of those who voted for a major-party candidate.
For those reasons, runoff elections are among the most difficult to poll. It’s especially hard to ascertain which voters will turn out: It will most likely be fewer than in the general election, but the numbers probably won’t mirror a typical midterm electorate either. In November, roughly five million people voted in Georgia, shattering a record. As of Thursday afternoon, nearly a million ballots had already been cast in the runoffs, according to government data compiled by the U.S. Elections Project. With hundreds of millions of dollars being poured into political ads in these two campaigns alone, millions more votes are expected by Jan. 5.
The polling industry is in a period of regrouping — licking its wounds and keeping its head down until the inevitable flood of post-mortem analyses and academic reports arrives, probably early next year. Those will explore the possible causes of the polling fiasco this fall, when polls nationwide and in various states underestimated support for President Trump and his Republican allies. Even without seeing those reports, pollsters agree that there’s a good chance they have been missing a chunk of the Republican electorate — particularly in polls with Mr. Trump on the ballot.
That wasn’t as pronounced a problem in Georgia, where polls fared relatively well. Trey Hood, who runs the University of Georgia’s polling operation, conducted a survey in mid-October for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that showed Mr. Trump and Joseph R. Biden Jr. in a dead heat — lining up well with the election’s final results. Dr. Hood said that a postelection analysis of his own polling had not indicated that he had a markedly higher rate of refusal in Trump-supporting areas.
