Pollster: Voter behavior will depend on the political environment in each state

Republican pollster Brett Loyd said Thursday that voter behavior will depend on the political environment in voters’ home states. 

“In a midterm election, I think that a lot of it is going to depend on what they got going on in their state,” Loyd told Hill.TV’s Jamal Simmons on “What America’s Thinking,” when asked what he thought was the best barometer for predicting voter behavior in November’s midterm elections. 

“Minnesota has a gubernatorial race, two Senate races, they’ve got some contested congressional districts. That’s probably going to drive out Minnesota voters, regardless [of] if they’re more interested in voting this year or not,” he continued.

“I think kind of the state of the state on Nov. 6 is what’s going to matter,” he said. 

Loyd was responding to a recent study from the Pew Research Center, seen on Hill.TV, which found that Democrats are more politically active than Republicans ahead of the midterm elections. 

The study found that 23 percent of Democrats surveyed said they had contributed money to campaigns within the past year, compared with 18 percent of Republicans surveyed. 

The Pew study also found that Democratic voters were more likely to have reached out to an elected official, with 36 percent saying they had contacted an official, while 28 percent of Republicans polled said the same. More than half of Democratic voters surveyed said they had participated in a campaign-related activity listed on the survey, compared with 40 percent of Republicans. 

“When we’re looking at these splits, they’re within three, four points of each other,” Loyd said. “In this Pew poll, one of the numbers that I looked at was interest in voting, if you’re more interested in voting this year than in previous elections.” 

“It’s not a terribly wide margin, that split, and second off, I don’t know if that should be the barometer in how we’re going to see this electorate come out on Election Day.” 

— Julia Manchester