Can Kentucky governor’s race polling be trusted? Many say to think twice

The Republican response to a recent poll from Fox56 and Emerson College Polling showing Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear up 16 points over GOP challenger Attorney General Daniel Cameron wasn’t surprising.

“If you believe that any Republican nominee for any KY office is at 33 (percent) in October, you are a complete moron,” Scott Jennings, a longtime GOP operative in Kentucky and Washington, posted to X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.

Others also offered criticism.

The Republican party spokesperson pointed out previous polling misfires from the same firm. Sen. Rand Paul’s, R-KY, chief strategist said he “just lost IQ points reading that ‘poll,’” and a GOP-aligned firm posted a full dissection of all the perceived errors of that particular survey.

But skepticism of the latest poll result – as well as the ability to even poll Kentucky accurately – isn’t limited to Republicans or even just Kentuckians.

Jared Smith, a Democratic strategist and lobbyist, called the Fox56/Emerson poll “trash.”

“I definitely think Andy is ahead – zero doubts about that,” Smith said.

But he added the huge 16-point margin doesn’t match up with more recent horse race polling between the candidates, and the results of other questions asked by the pollster raise questions about the poll.

From June up until the latest poll, surveys from independent, as well as partisan, polls had shown Beshear anywhere from 10 to 4 points ahead of Cameron.

Co/efficient, a Republican polling company co-founded by a general consultant to the Cameron campaign, dug into alleged demographic deficiencies of the Fox56/Emerson poll.

In a post, the pollster stated the “very small sample” of 450 registered voters “looks nothing like any general election turnout in decades,” citing age, party registration and method of reaching the voters.

The same pollster released a survey showing Beshear up just 2 percentage points over Cameron in the immediate aftermath of Cameron’s blowout May primary win.

Decision Desk HQ executive Brandon Finnigan in a rare online post, his first since 2021, took aim at the latest poll. It’s an example of why polling Kentucky is “the stuff of nightmares,” he wrote.

Getting a gauge on support for the Republican candidate in Kentucky is so difficult, he wrote, that many pollsters don’t even try.

“The state seems to bedevil every entity that tries to divine how Republican an election will end up… I really can’t exaggerate how bad the horserace polling is in this state,” Finnigan wrote.

Four years ago was a relatively accurate polling period, with two independent polls conducted in October 2019 getting the nail-biter Beshear victory essentially spot on, but that year was an outlier, per Finnigan.

Thirty-nine of 40 statewide polls since 2014 that Finnigan reviewed underestimated the Republican’s final vote share. There was an eight-point average undercount of Republican support in those polls, Finnigan found.

In 2015, most pollsters projected that the governor’s race leaned toward former Democratic Attorney General Jack Conway. Former GOP Gov. Matt Bevin ended up winning by a whopping 9 percentage points, causing panic among pollsters and analysts around the nation.

However, Democratic support was much more accurate to poll. Twenty-eight of the 40 polls overestimated Democratic candidate support, with all of them averaging a collective one-point overshoot for Democrats.

“For whatever reason, the polls can tell you what the Democrat is going to end up with, but in a two-way race, you’re still missing half of the story,” Finnigan wrote.

Why is this? University of Kentucky Political Science Professor and longtime state political observer D. Stephen Voss, said that two factors could be at play.

“One is there is a subset of Republicans, the Trump vote, that won’t cooperate with polls. I think there is some bias, caused not by the procedures of the polling company but caused by the nature of the electorate.,” he said.

“We do have maybe a larger share of that group of Republican voters who are non-compliant when it comes to to pollsters.”

The other reason: Republicans are often late to “fall in line” with their party. He said that polls that end up vastly different from the final result could be an accurate “snapshot,” but that so many Republican voters make their choice late in election season.

Though Voss agreed that it’s wise to take Kentucky poll results with a grain of salt – “so large you risk hypernatremia,” Finnigan joked – but that the poll many are criticizing is still helpful to take into consideration.

“To see (Beshear) this much ahead in the last poll only reinforces the strength of conviction that he’s going into this race in this last month with a significant lead that Cameron needs to hope to overcome,” Voss said.

“That’s what I do with the poll, I say ‘I’m even more confident Beshear is notably ahead here.’ I don’t interpret it as ‘Beshear is ahead by double digits.’”

Smith suggested that other factors about Kentucky voters make the state especially tricky to poll.

“You used to be able to poll just by calling landlines, and now you have to poll in a variety of ways – cell phone calls, texting, internet. I mean you name it and they’re trying to do it, but I just think they haven’t figured it out yet.”

He added: “And a lot of the state doesn’t have great wifi. We’re drastically reducing landline polling in a state that doesn’t have broadband everywhere, so how are you really reaching voters that are gonna vote in that next election?”

One pollster in 2020 even misidentified Smith.

“In 2020, I was standing on my back porch and I got a poll for the House district that’s two blocks over from me,” Smith said. “If they can’t do that part, right, what makes you think they can do the whole thing?”