In the aftermath of Election Day 2016, it became clear that we’d experienced the campaign through a funhouse mirror. Our friends, Facebook and Twitter feeds, even the New York Times election forecast needle: all of it had been wrong. Most of us inside the beltway were shocked by the result precisely because of the insular way in which we experienced the race; opinions offered by peers and family, discussions around the water cooler, and content posted on our social media feeds reinforced a shared (and flawed) sense that Donald Trump had no chance to win.
We are now at risk of losing sight of reality again—this time in the Democratic presidential primary. The first votes are not for seven months, but already, a minority of hyper-engaged Democrats are working hard to shape the race—and we’re riveted by them. Yet these hyper-engaged Democrats are not representative of the primary electorate, and conflating the two creates a “funhouse effect” that is about as accurate as the image you see in a circus mirror. If campaigns take their cues from just this narrow segment of voters—and come to believe that they are a proxy for the whole pool of Democratic voters—we could go off course and find ourselves in a weakened position against Trump come next November.
To counter this refraction, Third Way has devoted its second quarterly poll of likely Democratic primary voters to exploring this divide between all primary voters and the subset of the hyper-engaged. CONT.
Lanae Erickson & Ryan Pougiales, Third Way