Opinion polling isn’t the only way to take the pulse of a political contest.
Recently the data-driven activist team at insightus has been kicking around the notion of conducting what some like to call a wallet poll: a compare-and-contrast demographic analysis of two competing campaigns’ small-dollar donors, made possible by matching donor names and addresses listed in each campaign’s monthly Federal Election Commission (FEC) filings with those same donors’ voter registration records. Here in North Carolina — a key battleground state this year — the latter are publicly available and a veritable goldmine of demographic information, including gender, age, race, ethnicity, political affiliation, and voting history.
Wallet polls aren’t perfect. They don’t attempt to predict election outcomes. They can’t, because they are not statistically valid random samples of the electorate. But they have strengths which opinion polls don’t. They don’t rely on respondents to give truthful answers to personal questions posed by anonymous strangers over the phone. They don’t suffer the low signal-to-noise ratio of fleeting opinions, given off the cuff, which might easily change tomorrow. They don’t require guessing who the ‘likely voters’ are. Instead, they characterize the carefully considered donation behavior, over time, of a candidate’s most deeply committed supporters: those who put their money where their mouths are, to the tune of at least $200 per election cycle (the trigger level for having one’s name declared to the FEC by the candidate you support).
insightus has just completed its first such wallet poll. Here are a few interesting highlights.
Trump’s most ardent supporters are even older than we thought
Opinion polling has already well established that Trump’s core constituency is the you-kids-get-off-my-lawn crowd, but it is more than a little surprising to see just how old these guys are: among 73 to 83+ year-olds, Trump reigns supreme in the wallet poll, while in every age group from 23 to 67 Clinton outperforms by substantial margins. Unfortunately for Trump, his antediluvian demographic comprises just 11% of North Carolina’s electorate, while the broader range of ages Clinton appeals to comprise 76% of the Tar Heel state’s voters. That said, it’s important to bear in mind that wallet polls are far from statistically valid samples of the electorate as a whole.
Gender: Equal and opposite forces
Both opinion polling and common sense have also, of course, already established that Trump isn’t exactly a big hit with the ladies, and insightus’s wallet poll has little to add to that well-worn observation. But on the Clinton side of the equation, it is surprising — to say the least — to find that fully two thirds of the North Carolinians who share their hard-earned dollars with her campaign also share her gender. Has there ever before been another presidential campaign so potently fueled by women’s dollars?
Et cetera….
There’s more to the insightus report than can comfortably fit here, including intriguing hints of disproportionate numbers of neo-Confederates and Ku Klux Klan members among Trump’s North Carolina donor base.
You can read the full report at insightus here:
Wallet Poll: The striking mirror-image faces of North Carolina’s Trump & Clinton campaign donors