VCU poll has Trump ahead of Biden in Virginia: But actually, it doesn’t

A few things appear off in the new VCU Wilder School poll that we’re told shows Donald Trump with a three-point lead on Joe Biden in Virginia.

Starting with, the poll’s internal tabs show that 329 of the 809 poll respondents, 40.7 percent, said they intend to vote for Biden, with Trump getting 310 votes among the group of respondents, 38.3 percent.

The press release from the VCU Wilder School folks, though, reports that, after the poll was weighted, Trump had a 39 percent-to-36 percent lead on Biden.

The fine print didn’t explain the weighting so that anybody without a deep grounding in how algorithms supposedly work could understand, so, no help there.

We do get, from another tab, that the respondents broke down to 30 percent Democrat, 26 percent Republican, and 44 percent other (independents, something else, don’t know or refused to reveal).

The 44 percent other were then asked to identify leaning, and there was a Republican lean there – 35 percent leaning Republican, 27 percent Democrat, the other 38 percent still out there blowing in the wind.

In terms of raw numbers, then, we ended up with 346 Democrats and Democrat-leaners, 341 Republicans and Republican-leaners, and 122 people who are either politically agnostic or are just really good at telling pollsters to bugger off.

That sample, which if anything would seem to underrepresent Democrats, ended up being weighted to turn a modest 2.4-point Biden lead to a three-point Trump lead.

Both, notably, are well within the poll’s margin of error.

And for what it’s worth, a modest 2.4-point Biden lead would still be a headline-grabber, given that Biden won Virginia in 2020 by 10 points, and that Democrats have won Virginia in each of the last four presidential races.

I’m not suggesting that there was a thumb on the scale from the VCU Wilder School, just that, maybe, the algorithm just needs tweaking.

Second thing: did you notice that in either set of numbers – the 39 percent-to-36 percent lead for Trump in the weighted numbers, or the 40.8 percent-to-38.3 percent lead for Biden in the raw numbers – we’re left with a lot of votes for third-party candidates and undecideds?

Diving into that, the poll tabs tell us that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. gets either 9 percent (weighted) or 6.3 percent (raw numbers), Jill Stein gets either 2 percent (weighted) or 1.2 percent (raw numbers), Cornel West gets either 1 percent (weighted) or 1.2 percent (raw numbers), and someone else and undecided at 8 percent (weighted) or 8.5 percent.

The thing you might notice here is, most polls assign a lot more voters to the major-party candidates, anywhere from the mid-80s percent range to that one NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist College poll from last week that had Biden with a 50 percent-to-48 percent lead nationally.

I tend to think the polls like this one we’re breaking down in depth today from the VCU Wilder School are actually more accurate in that they don’t try to give a hard assignment to leaning voters, though I would like to see a sort of ranked-choice aspect just to get a gauge as to where the people who are either undecided or are saying now that they’re going to vote third-party might be in a few months.

Kennedy, at either 6.3 percent or 9 percent, is almost certainly not going to end up at either of those numbers in the final accounting; the only third-party candidates to get more than 6 percent of the national popular vote in the last century are George Wallace (1968), John Anderson (1980) and Ross Perot (1992).

What I’m getting at is, we’re talking either 25 percent (weighted) or 21 percent (raw numbers) of the Virginia electorate currently not committed to either Biden or Trump, who are clearly neck-and-neck.

I think we end up with Kennedy, Stein and West getting in the area of a total of about 5 or 6 percent, meaning …

There’s a lot of wiggle room between Biden and Trump, somewhere between 15 and 19 percent of the voters in the state.

My thinking is that Biden, who according to the VCU Wilder School poll is at 75.8 percent support among Democrats in Virginia, with 6.2 percent of Dems saying they’ll vote for Kennedy, and a confusing 4.6 percent saying they’ll vote for Trump, with Stein and West getting a combined 4.5 percent, and 5 percent undecided, is going to see his support among Democrats increase once he is entrenched as the nominee after the convention next month.

Once he’s up to the mid to upper 80s among Dems, Virginia goes back into the safe column for Biden.

But it’s worth having to pay close attention to, as the snapshot in time that we get from today’s VCU Wilder School poll makes clear.