( @PhillyGuy , The New Republic’s Susan Milligan went with “vastly” - see below )
Milligan asks the reader a question I find myself asking over and over again: Is polling itself dispositive? Beyond mere musing, however, Milligan brings receipts:
Democrats have weathered similar scares in recent cycles. In 2022, a preelection poll by the nonpartisan National Association of Latino Elected Officials found that 57 percent of Latinos favored Democratic candidates for Congress. Exit polls determined that 64 percent voted for a Democratic House candidate. A projected drop in female Hispanic support never materialized: While 56 percent said before the election they’d vote for the Democrat in the midterms, 68 percent actually did so. That’s largely because the “undecideds” in that poll went for the Democrats, coming home in November as the party counted on them doing.
… as with Latinos in the midterms, there is historical evidence that disaffected Democratic base voters may withhold support for the party in interviews with pollsters but pull the Democratic lever in November. Fox News, reporting this week that Biden is ahead of Trump for the first time since October 2023, noted that the Democrat had 79 percent Black support in one of its 2020 surveys—but then went on to win 91 percent of the Black vote in Fox’s own exit poll that year.
Other tidbits from this link:
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Democratic activists going door-to-door in Georgia report never even turning up the one-off African-American Trump supporter. Even Black voters concerned with Biden are weighing Biden against “staying home” instead of flipping to Trump.
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Few Black voters participated in Republican primaries in Georgia (5% of ballots dispensed), South Carolina (3%), and Virginia (4%). The latter two were open primaries where long-time Democratic registrants had the option to vote in the Republican primary.
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Hispanic voters in populous Texas and Florida are conservative enough (percentage-wise) to “blow the curve” and affect national numbers enough to make it look like Hispanic support for Democrats is falling everywhere at once. Instead, Hispanic support for Democrats is a separate individual story in every state.