With less than two weeks until the election, the last-minute flurry of campaigning ― big rallies, boatloads of yard signs and armies of volunteers, not to mention candidates’ attempts to tout all those things as signs of their voters’ enthusiasm ― can seem unavoidable.
Donald Trump, still generally lagging in national polls, has made an especial point of touting the size of his events.
“No matter where we go, we have these massive crowds. ...It’s been amazing, the receptivity,” he told an Ohio audience on Thursday. “There’s never been anything like this in this country.” On Monday, he lauded a second-hand report of Trump bumper stickers:
A new HuffPost/YouGov poll, though, makes two things clear: one, most Americans aren’t going to rallies, volunteering or even publicly displaying their support for either for the presidential candidates, making it a poor gauge for voters’ excitement, and two, neither Clinton nor Trump has an especially clear advantage on any of those metrics.
Eight percent of Americans said in the survey that they’d been to a rally or event this year for Clinton, and 6 percent that they’d attended one in support of a Democratic congressional candidate in their state. Six percent had been to a Trump rally, and 4 percent to an event for a GOP congressional hopeful.
Seven percent had volunteered or raised money for Clinton, and 5 for a Democratic congressional candidate. Four percent reported volunteering or raising money for Trump, and 3 percent for a Republican running for Congress.
Few people are even going to the trouble of slapping a bumper sticker on their car or sticking a sign in their yard. Ten percent say they’re using either of those two means to publicly show their support for Clinton, and 6 percent for a Democrat running for Congress in their state. Nine percent have a sticker or sign for Trump, and 3 percent for a Republican congressional candidate.
But the vast majority, 81 percent, of Americans haven’t gone to any events or rallies this year, either for Trump, Clinton, or any other presidential or congressional candidates. Eighty-five percent haven’t volunteered or donated, and 79 percent haven’t put up yard signs or bumper stickers. About two-thirds haven’t done any of those things.
(Even that probably overstates the percentage of people taking an active role in the election. Research has shown that the kind of people who sign up for online survey panels and participate in polls about politics tend to be more civically engaged than the average citizen, although YouGov’s weighting process seems to make its results less susceptible to that effect. Some who aren’t all that politically active may also still feel the urge to exaggerate a bit because such participation is seen as socially desirable.)
Plenty of people who don’t go to rallies or shout their political beliefs from the rooftops, though, still vote ― and the electorate as a whole doesn’t necessarily look like its loudest members. As The Huffington Post wrote earlier this year:
A June 2012 Gallup survey found that just 12 percent of Americans had volunteered for a political campaign, donated to a campaign or attended a political rally. The venerable General Social Survey reported in 2014 that just 28 percent of Americans said they’d ever gone to a political meeting or rally. In contrast, nearly 60 percent of all Americans eligible to vote turned out in 2012.
The fact that only a tiny slice of the nation attends campaign events wouldn’t matter if that slice were a good representation of the entire voting public. Polls, after all, may survey 1,000 people or fewer. But while pollsters take care to make sure their results are representative of the electorate at large, the kind of people who show up at candidates’ rallies come from the unusually enthusiastic and committed end of the spectrum.
“People who go to rallies are more involved in politics and more motivated by a particular candidate’s message,” HuffPost’s Natalie Jackson wrote earlier this month. “They are probably more likely to vote than those staying at home on the couch, but many of those on the couch actually will get up to vote. Voting is generally a much less burdensome method of participating in politics than attending a campaign rally.”
Ginning up voter enthusiasm matters, as does having well-planned get-out-the-vote efforts. But with such a small fraction of Americans actually going to rallies, well-populated campaign events don’t say much about a candidate’s success at either.
Use the widget below to further explore the results of HuffPost/YouGov’s survey, using the menu at the top to select survey questions and the buttons at the bottom to filter the data by subgroups:
The HuffPost/YouGov poll consisted of 1,000 completed interviews conducted Oct. 25-27 among U.S. adults, using a sample selected from YouGov’s opt-in online panel to match the demographics and other characteristics of the adult U.S. population.
The Huffington Post has teamed up with YouGov to conduct daily opinion polls.You can learn more about this project and take part in YouGov’s nationally representative opinion polling. Data from all HuffPost/YouGov polls can be found here. More details on the polls’ methodology are available here.
Most surveys report a margin of error that represents some, but not all, potential survey errors. YouGov’s reports include a model-based margin of error, which rests on a specific set of statistical assumptions about the selected sample, rather than the standard methodology for random probability sampling. If these assumptions are wrong, the model-based margin of error may also be inaccurate. Click here for a more detailed explanation of the model-based margin of error.