The Daily Signal - 2 Polls in Va. Governor Race Paint Very Different Pictures. Why Is Media Only Showing Democrat-Friendly One?

Episode Date: May 29, 2025

Virginia’s November gubernatorial election is touted as a major barometer for how the electorate feels about the party in power in Washington, and national money for both parties is already pouring into the state. Two polls are showing two very different results in the race, yet the media is touting the one where the Democrat is far ahead. The Daily Signal asks founder of VirginiaFREE, Chris Saxman, how the race is really shaping up. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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contact Desjardin today. We'd love to talk, business. He has known as many things to many people. Most folks will know him as the owner, editor, Chief Cook and bottle washer at Virginia Free and well-respected and well-read substack as well as website, certainly of the public policy world in Virginia. But years ago, very well thought of Virginia, a member of the House of Delegates from the Shenandoah Valley in the Stanton area. Yeah, we have folks like Chris Saxman to count as folks who represented the Shenandoah Valley for many years. Chris, welcome back to the show. How are you, sir? Well, with those kind of introductions, Joe, you can count on me come back just about every day.

So keep it up. Don't say that too loudly. People are writing this down. Chris, one of the things that doesn't fascinate me in as much as I think it should is first, how polls conducted can be so wildly disparate in their results. but even less fascinating to me, though it should, is how the press, confronted with two polls showing radically different results, can choose to only report on one of them, the one that shows an enormous lead for Congressman Winspanberger, former Congressman Wendzstanberger, in her race for governor with Lieutenant Governor Winsom Earl Sears. Virginia Free just commissioned their own poll, not with some fly-by-night organization either. The Harris Group is perhaps one of the most famous polling organizations in the country. And your poll came out radically different than the Roanoke College one,

where your poll had the margin at about 4%, whereas the Roanoke College poll set the margin at about 17%. Now, you've been around this quite a bit. How do polls get that far apart in such a short period of time? Well, thank you for mentioning our poll. We thought it was a very good poll. We had two polling operations, one Pantheon Insights, with Amanda Iovino, the 2021 pollster of the year nationally,

who has been polling Virginia for the last, I guess, five years. So she knows Virginia inside and out. and she's been a great friend of Virginia Free, and she does a monthly polling update for folks that's free and available through our Zoom broadcasts, and we have a great relationship with her. But when we did this poll, which was initiated to look at specific issues

for the business community, primarily right to work, tariffs and doge. We looked at, you know, how are we going to get this and get it right? We wanted to get it right. And when I talked to both of these operations, I said, look, I want to make sure that this is a credible poll and that the methodology is locked down. I think the word I used was Christine when I was talking to the Harris folks because I don't want the blowback, which of course now we're getting because our poll came out juxtaposed to the Rona College poll. And we have a very different construct of the Virginia electorate this year.

We come at it with Virginia being a D plus three state. That's a generic look at Virginia. Where are we right now? And our poll started with a D plus three construct. For the folks who don't know, that means, you know, when you sample, you're going to sample perhaps 3% more Democrats than Republicans. Three points, yeah. So it's like, and I don't know what the next one of the number would.

It would be like, so in your poll construction, you go like 37% Democrat, 34% Republican and the remainder independence. And that's what Virginia is. You know, Virginia is 18% black. But we have a certain percentage of people with a college degree. And those are your demographics when you're trying to get a snapshot of Virginia, you know, this is where things are. And again, we came out this from a perspective of policies, not the,

not the partisan races that are going on. In this stage of the race, it's going to be generic because people aren't that dialed into the election, right? Most people are not paying attention to Virginia gubernatorial politics right now, except for the people who are always engaged in Virginia politics, which is the base of both parties, right? And that's why I said, look, we're going to poll this as likely voters. grown up college,

pulled residents and registered voters. And that's a very different subset of Virginia. Likely voters in an off-year cycle are going to have a higher propensity of voting. So why would you, I mean, from our perspective, to make it valid to largely the political class and the media, why would you come out with anything but a likely voter sample, which is a deeper sample of the electorate,

and more specific, but that's who's going to show up in 2025. Right. In 2024, you're going to have, you know, like we had last time, I think we had a 71 or 72% turnout. Well, we're not going to get a 71, 72% turnout in 24. This is not like in 25. This is not a national election. Right. This is going to be, you know, in the low 50s in turnout.

So we had to account for that because, again, we wanted it to be a, and because of my previous work with, in the Republican party and specifically for lieutenant governor when i you know ran her pack for a year and a half and just full disclosure i left working for winsome at the end of march and two years ago so and i haven't really spoken to her probably in the last year almost a year i haven't really got a conversation with her but i thought that both parties in their campaigns all the time just what i do well and so we want to make sure that i want to make sure that the poll stood up on its own so We come at it from a D plus three and Spanberger's at plus four. And then you have the House.

We did a generic House Republicans versus House Democrats and it's D plus six, which is exactly what Virginia was in 24, six months ago in the November election. Harris won by six points. So I think our poll stands up to where Virginia actually is. Well, and you pointed out the subtext of your poll was more about the more perhaps even educational for those who are currently in office as a litmus test for what the business owners, the business community was thinking about some of these issues that are going to trickle down into the Virginia economy, whereas the Rono College poll was very much a sociological zeitgeist look into who was upset and anxious about the elected representatives and their behaviors and things like that. Does that play a role? And I guess more importantly, if you ask a bunch of questions about how nervous you are about politics and then you say, so who do you have for governor, that might taint the answers a little bit. I guess the order in which you ask the questions is important when you do a poll.

Yeah, well, we start out by, I don't know if the order was, you know, Trump approval, disapproval, Youngton approval, disapproval. and then we went into Spanberger versus Sears, but we also asked Spanberger versus Sears versus Denver Regulman. But to your point of your original question, is how can you have some of different polling results, but why did the press largely ignore ours and go with the more dramatic 17 points?

Well, probably because that's a better headline for them to get people to click on their stories, but the Roanoke College poll, whereas we were D plus three, they were D plus nine. And D plus nine is basically Connecticut or Washington State. Wow. I'm sorry. That's not Virginia. Just telling us not, and I'm not attacking their poll.

I'm just saying our poll, academic polls have a different outlook from the jump. They have a very different construct of what they're trying to do from an academic perspective and trying to figure out what Virginia is doing and where they're going. But, you know, we're D plus three. They're D plus nine. We were likely voters in our sample. And we released our results on the policy issues before we released our results on the gubernatorial race because we didn't want the poll on the race overshadowing the polling questions,

especially on Right to Work, which is extremely popular in Virginia, which was we wanted to see where that was. and what we had to do to educate the electorate on the question, and that was the purpose of the poll to begin with. So when you look at how this is done, and there's a reality check, because when the press says there's a 17-point deficit, there is reality.

You were a member of the Virginia House of Delegates, and I'm sure there were polls that came out on your races, and if there's a 17-point deficit, that infringes, on fundraising, volunteer collection. And so, and I feel sometimes,

you know, certainly it's well within Roanoke College's position to publish any poll they want. But when the press is going around saying, well, you know, this is, everything's done, not only does it, dampen voter turnout, I think. I remember reading somewhere about, vote suppression, but it also starts to dry up campaign contributions from folks who might only

be able to see that. And then they get a letter saying, hey, can you help my campaign? And I'm like, oh, you're down by 17 points. I'm not, you know, I'm going to buy some lumber at lows. instead. And I think that that's somewhere where the press needs to acknowledge polls like yours, spend more time from my standpoint, looking at the demographics of Virginia. Like you said, it's easy in states where they register by parties, Chris. You just say, oh, there's somebody. But because we don't register by party, you know, you have to go by research, by analysis. And you're right. It is most of the places I've seen. It's like 36 to 33 with the remainder 27 or so percent independent.

When polled, when asked who you got, it seems to turn out that way. And does that frustrate you as somebody who sort of straddles both sides? At Virginia Free, you are a media personality to a degree, but based on your substack writing and everything else, that we don't do that. We're simply going for the clickbait headline and the tune in at five, you know, promo. Yeah. This, what's frustrating to me, yes, it's frustrating because people are putting up these articles about these two polls, but no one called me or texted me or messes me on Twitter X. You know, and say, hey, why do you think it's so different?

I could have sent them the poll and said, here you go. I mean, Dwayne Nancy at Cardinal News did a very good event of comparing them to him. Like, why are they so different? I mean, he was intellectually curious. You're intellectually curious. And I respect that. These other publications, you know, it's really shocking that they would do that. They said, oh, and there's another poll.

There's a 17-point spread for Spanberger. But if you look at the poll and you look at the methodology, it doesn't stand up to where Virginia is going to be in 2025. Now, she might win by 17 points. But she's not there right now because this is May. People aren't paying attention. It's a generic poll. We're in a generic time. This is a basically, are you going to show up and vote from the Republican and the Democrat?

This isn't just where we are. Well, it's the beginning of the summer. If you look in the poll, there's an enthusiasm gap. The Republicans have to overcome. There's a bit of it. There's a little bit of a, you know, lack of enthusiasm in the basis of Democrats. than the basic Democratic Party, WS, Spanberger.

Winston is in the low 30s with blacks, which is very impressive for a Republican and a real problem for the Democrats in a turnout model where they need a higher black turnout. What are they going to do to do that? But when you say to everybody else, the 17 point cuts both ways

because it can say to a Republican, well, you're out of the loop. You're not going to win. But for the Democrats, they're also going, hey, chip into my campaign. They're like, why, you're already going to win.

We shouldn't donate to this. we got other things to do nationally, whatever it is. True. So it cuts both ways when you don't accurately report or even have a modicum of intellectual curiosity as to the differences in polls. And that's one thing we want to make sure because, again, because of my previous partisan life, I had to account for that and make sure. And that's why I had two pollsters, right?

I had two pollsters going. And it's not my poll. I mean, I paid for it. We paid for it. I raised the money for it. I asked, I constructed the questions. But it's not my poll per se. This is two polling operations combining their efforts, checking each other's math, doing the waiting appropriately.

So that when we come out and say, here are the numbers, people don't go, oh, wow, it's just another partisan. Paul. He's a former Republican, whatever. Yeah. You know, I mean, I wouldn't know how to digger a poll. to my benefit. I have no knowledge of how to do that. You know, I'm just not that guy.

I don't. And you never have been. And that's, you know, I think to the reason why people like going to Virginia free and reading your substack, Chris. Chris Saxman is on with us. And one of the things I was explaining to folks is there are also different types of polling, meaning internal polls, that nobody ever sees. And those are the ones that are, to me, Those are the ones that are the ones that get harsh on a candidate.

They're almost like opposition research because they're trying to find those places where you need to work harder at something or another. Are there messages? That's how you push a pull. That's how you push a pull. You go, if you knew that a person would, you know, sped in a school zone and got drunk driving with, you know, kids in the, the car, you know, would you be less likely or more likely to vote for or against that person? That's that's a pushpole. That's that's something that campaigns do to test messages.

And that's appropriate to figure out what, what are the what are the motivators for voters? But this is just straight up, do you approve or disapprove Donald Trump? Do you approve or disapprove of Glenn Yonkin, are you for Winston-Series or Avillo-Standberter? People have said, well, how can it be any undecided? Well, we just, we took the, we asked the question, do you both, are you supporting, like Abigail Stamberger or, you know, are you, are you four or are you leaning that way? Are you four winsome? Or are you leaning that way? And we took the lean, people who said, I'm leaning that way as going that way. Because that's typically what happens. So that's, that's why we chose that path and I put that information out there. But we also said, we also put out there the actual numbers of all of that. So, you know, you just, I just wish people would just pick up the phone and go, hey, Zach, what's going on? Well, and that's why I did. But one of the questions, and because this was a business-oriented poll, and I know that a lot of my friends are saying, hang in there with the tariffs, hang in there with Doge, because at the end of the day, this is all going to start to increase the value of your dollars and increase economic activity and businesses are going to do better. So take us into that aspect of it.

Let's put the political figures on the shelf for the time being and talk about what you learned and what this poll says about Virginia business owners. And, you know, are they enthusiastic? Are they, you know, locking everything down? Are they, you know, storing food for the winter? What is their, what is their metric right now as this tumultuous Washington, D.C. activity continues? Well, this wasn't a poll of business owners. This was a poll of likely voters. Oh, okay.

I'm sorry. When you talk about the business issues, yeah. Well, we wanted to see where the public was on certain aspects of certain policy issues. We also polled, you know, what types of businesses do you think positively or negatively? And, you know, pharmaceutical companies, they're not well regarded right now. Shocked, I am. Well, I mean, but that's a, we look at that and go, okay. And it's interesting enough in our poll, Democrats view small businesses better than Republicans view small businesses.

Not by a lot, but it's there. Interesting. Yeah, it's very interesting. Again, if the reporter calls me out, they still can. We can talk about these things. Doge is 47, 53, 47% support production in federal workforce. in Virginia and total opposed is 53. Interesting.

So that's, again, we took the somewhat support, somewhat opposed, and pushed them together to get, to get, but you see the strongly opposed is 34, the strongest support is 23. So the intensity is in the opposition on Doge. Likewise, the tariff policies, the president, are not popular in Virginia. They are strongly opposed at 45%

versus strong and supported 21%. They don't, the short-term versus long-term gain, short-term losses for long-term benefits is a loser. That's 43% to 57. So Virginians are not, and this is why we did it, from the policy perspective, say, look, Virginia is not on board with the policies of tariffs. They're just not.

Some are, but the opposition is in far more intense than the support. And that's what politicians take a look at. It's like, okay, we disagree, but are you going to show up? What are you going to show up and vote for? That's the key. That's the absolute key. Now, the reason we asked on right to work, the question we asked is the policy. Because when you ask someone, hey, do you support right to work?

They go, yeah, I guess. What's right to work? They don't know the policy. They don't. And I understand that. I mean, they have a lot going on their lives. As a phrase, as a phrase, I think everyone should have the right to work. And so as a phrase.

Of course. Right. I'd be opposed to that, right? So here's the question we asked. There was a statement. We read the following statement, workers should never be forced against their will to join a union or pay dues to a union as part of their job. Okay, workers should never be forced against it whether joint union or pay dues to a union. 89% support that.

Wow. 89%. That's right. So I wasn't expecting anything near that in this poll. Here's the thing. strongly agree is 58. Strongly disagree is 3%. Wow.

So when you put those numbers out there and you say, hey, you want to, because there was a question whether Stanberger was going to support repeal of right to work. And we have almost all of the lieutenant governor candidates for the Democrat supporting repeal of right to work. We're going, hey, if you want to go there on this, we'll go there with you, but we don't think we need to have the fight. And we don't want to have the fight, right? But this is a lockdown number one issue for the business community. Like, this is a red line for us. And we value our relationships in both political parties, but there are certain times you got to say, okay, game on.

Well, you know. And that is one of those issues. With the gloves and the hats on. Let's go get it. Yeah, get a helmet. So, but that is one of those issues that if you bracket it in different ways, I know that our listeners will recognize the issue of a woman's right to choose versus the law that is potentially going to become a constitutional amendment. And when you say should a woman have a right to access choice and the abortion, I think it's 68 percent was the last poll I saw done statewide that said, sure, they should have that choice.

And a political party will say, see, Virginia is supporting abortion amendment. But then if you show the Virginia voters in a poll what that amendment says, it's almost the exact opposite. I think it's 65% oppose the degree to which the Virginia constitutional amendment goes. So you can see how, depending how you phrase the question, really can have an impact. It's very important. Well, that's what like when I would write bills or debate bills and amend bills in the legislature, it wasn't what you thought about the issue. It's what the actual bill says. That is the law, right?

You know, so when you say, do you believe women should have a right to abortion? Okay. At what point does that person no longer have that right? Or is there a point at which you say, no, this is this is gone too far? and Republicans have moved from a pro-life party to a pro-choice party for the most part. They basically said they weren't 15 weeks now or 12 weeks, whatever it is. And that's frankly a pro-choice position because you're saying yes, but at this point, you've drawn a line.

Now the Democrats are moving towards a pro-abortion position that says all the way up to the point of birth, you can have an unobstructed path to abortion. but when you put that to the voter they kind of go, well, now, wait a second. When you put it that way, I'm not sure where I am. I at six, 12, 15, you know, viability of the fetus. You know, my wife has held a baby in her hand who's a god child at, I think, 22 weeks. And the kid was like in the out was, it was ounces when he was born. Now he's five years old turning cartwheels.

So, you know, those real conversations start to take place when you look. at what the actual law says. Yeah. It's absolutely. And it is why it is important for people who hold these offices, I believe, to have research done. It would be just like, you know, opening up a coffee shop and only serving hazelnut coffee and saying, well, gosh, nobody comes in. They're all going down the street where there's three or four or five choices.

and not understanding your marketplace. And in the world of politics, that marketplace is the voter, is the citizen. And I think it's why people say, oh, polls, there are real things, undecided issues like right to work that might be indicative of having a political lien that isn't necessarily something that manifests, well, I don't like this candidate. but what the candidate stands for I'm all for can be a very important thing for people to see. A hundred percent. I, you know, I threaten my life. I've got to know a few campaign managers in my day. And they always tell their principal, if you see a bad poll, they tell them it's a, it's a crap poll.

Don't believe that. Because they don't want the bad news. They only want the good news. But when the journalists put out there for headlines and they don't go, oh, we got apples and oranges here because of the base. basic construct of the poll because, you know, Ronuk was at plus nine and we're at plus three. You know, if you don't explain that early on the poll, I think it's not a very credible article. Well. Or a headline. But guess what people read and post and absorb as actual fact. And it's just that's, that's one of the difficulties in, in American politics these days.

Well, in journalism, too. So, so, so turnout, turn out Joe in 2024 was 70.48%. Okay. Mm-hmm. Now, in 2021, the last gubernatorial election, it was 54.9. Okay. That delta has to be accounted for when you're going into this election cycle. Right. That loss in voter enthusiasm.

And it's always been, you know, the political people I know, they just scratch their heads and sit there and say, how do we, and that's the existential question. How do you get somebody that only votes in every presidential election to turn out for the gubernatorial race? And I think the both parties have been getting much better at that. But that's always the challenge for, you know, how do we, because look, in 2021, 3.2, 3.3 million people voted. 3.3. Last year, 4.5 voted. So that's 1.2 million people more who are not expected to show up this time. The job of both political parties is to find those people and try to get them back out to the polls.

right yeah absolutely that's not that's not my job my job is to go okay based on history and based what we know about virginia here's what we're going to poll in may to see what's really going on on the issues that were concerned to us and we'll see where in our numbers line up with where trump is and where yonkin is and i and i'm really pleased with what that turned out to be that'll do it for today's show don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss out on new episodes from The Daily Signal. Every weekday, you can catch top news in 10 to keep up with the day's top headlines in just 10 minutes, and every weekday afternoon catch Victor Davis Hanson's thoughtful analysis for The Daily Signal. If you like what you hear on this

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