Vote your conscience and don’t be swayed by what the polls are saying

We have entered what inside politicos call the “silly season,” when hundreds of polls are published daily all over the country.

There is one other much more important aspect to any campaign than a poll — what will be the makeup and amount of the so-called “voter turnout” at the end of Election Day.

A single voter can do very little to influence how a poll is conducted and what it might reveal. Many people have not ever been polled in their lifetime and never will be.

However, there is one thing over which every voter has 100% personal control — casting their legal vote. One of the most troubling things about our electoral system is how many people willingly choose to self-suppress their input in the common course of civic debate by choosing not to register to vote or by failing to cast a vote in every election.

The Census Bureau reported that in the 2024 presidential election, 73% of the voting-age population was registered to vote and 65.3% voted. Among men, 63.7% voted versus 66.9% of women.

However, in off-year congressional elections, the number of people who vote typically drops by half, which means our state and federal governments get run by people who were elected by a small plurality of adults eligible to vote. Our government gets run by candidates elected by voters who vote, not by people who stay at home.

If you are one of those conservative voters who only vote in presidential elections, you might want to consider not sitting out this election due to the high stakes involved. If you find yourself getting discouraged by the number of polls showing a Republican behind in certain key campaigns such as the U.S. Senate and are tempted not to vote either, force yourself to remember that each poll is simply a snapshot of the potential electorate during a set period of time before an election, not the real thing.

This is important to remember in light of the advent of massive independent campaign committees: Many polls are commissioned for purely political purposes and designed to affect voter turnout. If the poll comes back with data and voter preference margins showing how an issue can be used negatively against the opponent, then that poll will be released to the general public through the most favorable or partisan media outlets possible. The hope is that voters on the opposite side of a lopsided poll will become discouraged and not vote at all.

For example, the 10-point lead often stated for former Gov. Roy Cooper over his Republican opponent, Michael Whatley, fails to take into account the historically close nature of every U.S. Senate race in the state dating back to 1980. There has been a remarkable convergence on the winner in each race receiving close to 50% of the final vote — not a 10-point spread — regardless of whether they were Republican or Democrat. The late Sen. Jesse Helms, who served five terms over a 30-year period, always went into the last weeks of any campaign behind in many polls only to win each time.

It has only been very recent history that registered Republicans (2,192,880) have outnumbered Democrats (2,168,633) in North Carolina. The math of that alone should argue for a much closer Senate race than many expect. But it also should buttress Republican chances in the state legislature. The key determinant will be how many Republicans show up to vote plus what the 2,874,390 unaffiliated voters will do, many of whom have voted for President Donald Trump several times and for the Republican supermajorities in the General Assembly. If Republicans and independents show up to vote for conservatives in numbers anywhere near the levels they did in 2024, 2020 or 2016, the dismal poll numbers will be a faded memory of the past.

When people don’t show up to vote, they forfeit their right to vote in all the other important state and local elections that affect their lives daily — from public education and transportation to local tax rates and public safety. They also fail to register their vote against the socialist policies of the left and for the freedom capitalist policies of the right.

If there ever was a congressional election where conservatives should be lining up to vote early and on Election Day and taking all their friends with them, this is the one. Instead of spending hundreds of millions on more TV ads, perhaps Republicans should be scheduling Uber drivers to take every Republican voter who doesn’t vote every election to the polls.