Richard Baris, director of Big Data Poll, in an interview with NTD. (The Nation Speaks/NTD)
Democrats didn’t address voters’ concerns, says Richard Baris
Richard Baris, director of Big Data Poll (BDP), says polling has been misused by media to influence voters and donors. Polling has become more inaccurate, especially in the last four election cycles, because it lacks balance, integrity, and transparency, Baris added.
BDP has been more accurate in its predictions of election winners and recently found that there is a large enough swing among college-educated, independent voters to likely make a historic impact in the upcoming midterm elections.
This group of independents also includes “a lot of suburban women, which is fueling, overall, a lead for the Republican Party on the generic ballot that is pretty historic,” Baris said during an interview for EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders” program. The full interview will premiere on Thursday, November 3 at 7:30pm ET on EpochTV.
The generic ballot is a political poll that asks which political party the person would vote for if the election were held that day, rather than which specific candidate they plan to vote for.
Many polls, including BDP, found a margin of 17 to 18 points for independent, suburban women voters that live in metro-suburban regions who are leaning toward the GOP, Baris said.
Baris said Trump was able to grab the majority of rural votes in his 2016 victory but had trouble with these other areas, and “those are the regions right now that are moving so fast away from Democrats,” he said. “And the impact is likely to be greater than we think.”
The vast majority of pollsters do not have enough empathy or humility to be effective at their jobs and get a diverse enough polling sample because they don’t even like the voters they are trying to poll, Baris said.
History on the GOP’s Side
Besides the swing of independent suburban women, history is on the side of the Republicans because typically, the sitting president’s party loses in the House and Senate races, particularly when the economy is in such chaos, said Baris.
The only time in recent history when that has not been true was in 2002, because the United States had just gone through 9/11 and voters felt the GOP and President George W. Bush could better protect the nation from terrorists, he said.
Baris said Democrats were trying to create that level of fear with the Jan. 6 Commission.
“Unfortunately for them, that’s just not what voters want to vote on. Voters are voting on cost-of-living, inflation, economy, and jobs,” he said. “The overwhelming sentiment is a sentiment that things cost too much, things are out of control, and that we need to make a change.”
Baris believes there were voters in 2020 who had no complaints about the Trump economy but voted for Biden because they didn’t like the turbulence of Trump’s presidency.
“It wasn’t that they didn’t approve of how Trump handled the economy,” he said. “It’s just the boat was rocking every day, and they were getting nauseous from it.”
Democrats Focus on the Wrong Issues
Baris said the Democrats miscalculated the reason they won the presidency in 2020.
Voters in the 2020 election were not “repudiating the Republican message and repudiating Donald Trump and affirming [the Democrats],” said Baris. Because of their wrong assessment, Democrats have emphasized things like Jan. 6, the Paul Pelosi attack, and abortion over the economy, which is now costing them.
“They expect Americans to just drop everything, not care that they can’t fill up their grocery cart, not care that they can’t fill up their gas tank, not care that they can’t purchase new clothes for their kids—or at least, maybe they can, but it’s a lot more than it was two years ago,” Baris said. “They want them to drop all of those concerns for their latest distraction, and Americans just aren’t doing it. They’re not going to do it”
The economy, inflation, and jobs are foremost on voters’ minds, and immigration and abortion come in around No. 3 for voters, he said.
The vast majority of voters who say abortion is their top concern are Democrats, and nearly the same number of independents will cite illegal immigration and border security as their no. 1 issue, he said.
Crime comes in at about No. 5 on the list of national voters’ concerns, said Baris, but it rises to No. 2 with rank distribution.
“Sometimes we like to use something called rank distribution, which will actually ask people to choose your No. 1 issue, but then rank them in the order of importance,” he said. With this method, “abortion falls every time in rank distribution because it’s not cited broadly.”
Election Integrity Concerns
Voters in swing states like Arizona, Florida, and Georgia cite election security and integrity as a top concern and want tighter voting laws like Voter ID and limited mail-in ballots, Baris said.
These same states, especially Georgia, have seen record voter turnout despite Democrats saying that Georgia’s voting laws were suppressing the vote and discriminating against black and minority voters.
“The bottom line is there never was evidence to suggest [voter suppression], and the share of minority vote has consistently gone up,” said Baris.
Governor’s Races
Baris said the Democrat Party put enormous amounts of money (50–1) into the governor’s race in Pennsylvania, and BDP shows Republican Doug Mastriano down four points from his Democrat challenger, Josh Shapiro. Consequently, he expects Mastriano to lose next week, but there is still a chance he could make a surprise win, Baris said.
“The Democrats are smart enough to know that Pennsylvania is the Keystone State for a reason. And if you can control Pennsylvania during a presidential election, you can deny someone the presidency,” he said. “I mean, that’s a reality.”
In Arizona, BDP has Republican Kari Lake in the lead for governorship, but the Senate races there are too close in polling to predict. If Lake can win over the independent voters, Baris believes she will definitely win over Democrat Katie Hobbs.
Citizens should be aware that counting votes is different from state to state, and it may take up to a week before a final winner is called, Baris said. In states like Washington, which take longer to count mail-in ballots, it may initially appear that the Democrat candidate has won, he said.
“And then over a number of days, as more Election Day vote is counted, it’ll chip away and get tighter and tighter and tighter, kind of a reverse effect of what we’re going to see in some of these other states like Pennsylvania,” he said.
