Today marks a very strange anniversary. It has been exactly one month since any poll has been released in the Virginia Governor’s race. The last poll in this race, conducted by Rasmussen from June 5th-6th, was released June 10, 2013.
The dearth of polling in this race is strange for several reasons. First, the race for governor is shaping up to be a close one this year in Virginia. In fact, the Real Clear Politics polling average has the race as an exact tie right now at 42.4% of the vote for both Republican Ken Cuccinelli and Democrat Terry McAuliffe. With such a close race shaping up, one would expect more frequent polling of this race.
Second, a number of polls have been conducted in other states during this time period. All the stranger is the fact that the states where polls have been conducted in this time period either do not feature major elections until 2014 such as Montana and Ohio or feature races that are not particularly close such as New Jersey (both Governor and Senate).
Third, during the same period in both 2005 and 2009 several polls were released in the Virginia Governor’s race (although there was an odd lull in polling from mid-August to early September in 2005). As the number of firms conducting public polls (and total number of polls) seems to have substantially increased in the past few years, the lack of polling this year in Virginia becomes even stranger.
Fourth, there are several other clear reasons to poll the state of Virginia besides the governor’s race. Both the extreme statements made by Lieutenant Governor Candidate E.W. Jackson and the scandal(s) surrounding Governor Bob McDonnell have also dominated the news in Virginia in recent weeks. Certainly Virginians (and all Americans) would find poll questions related to those topics to be of interest as well.
At this point, I don’t have a clear explanation for the lack of polling in Virginia, but I will offer my best conjecture for why we have not seen more polls in recent weeks. I think part of it stems from the fact that the race is, to quote Public Policy Polling, a “lesser of two evils race.” In other words, this race does not feature a widely popular candidate such as New Jersey Governor Chris Christie or Newark Mayor and Senate candidate Cory Booker (nor is there even a candidate in the race as, let us just say, entertaining as Anthony Weiner for New York City Mayor).
If this race is truly a race between the “lesser of two evils” as Public Policy Polling posits, then the race will be decided by underlying partisan dynamics and the ability of each side to turn out their base in what is likely to be a low turnout election. Such conditions are generally not a recipe for great interest from the public. Therefore, with a general lack of interest from the public, there is not a great incentive for polling firms to go out of their way to poll this state.
We certainly will see polls out of Virginia in the weeks and months to come. Nevertheless, the current situation is puzzling and is at least worthy of mention.