Conservative Pollster Who Predicted 'Red Wave' Says GOP Can't 'Strategize'

A conservative pollster who badly misjudged the 2022 midterms has blamed the absence of a "red wave" on poor Republican turnout and the GOP's failure to "strategize."

Trafalgar Group CEO Robert Cahaly was one of only a few pollsters to correctly predict former President Donald Trump's victory over Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016. His polling firm may have been one of the country's most inaccurate during the 2022 election cycle, predicting a massive national surge of GOP support that largely failed to materialize.

During an interview published by New York magazine on Thursday, Cahaly defended his polling methods while arguing that the Republican Party's poor strategy and inability to "get out the vote" was to largely blame for his polls being out of sync with the election results.

"If you want to ask what I think happened—and we're going to spend a lot of time studying this—but on first blush, Republicans have no idea how to do 'get out the vote,'" Cahaly said. "The Democrats are very good at it ... The bottom line is the Democrats had better overall strategy. The Republicans just did not strategize well."

"It is hard to anticipate in polling one party doing that great a job at getting the vote out in targeted states and the other party doing that terrible of a job at getting the vote out in targeted states," he added.

Cahaly said that there was "no question" Democrats had been able to siphon some Republican votes in races with more divisive GOP nominees. He also said that Trafalgar Group "should have just anticipated" that large numbers of young people would vote in the election.

A recent analysis from Tufts University's Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement found that turnout of voters ages 18 to 29 was at the second-highest level since the early 1990s, with Democrats leading the youth vote by a 28-point margin.

Alan Abramowitz, Emory University political science professor and expert on polling, told Newsweek that Cahaly blaming his firm's inaccurate polls on GOP strategy and turnout efforts made "no sense."

"Pre-election polls are supposed to factor turnout into their estimates by identifying likely voters," Abramowitz said. "In fact, Cahaly has, in the past, claimed that his poll did a better job than more traditional polls at identifying likely voters, specifically typically low propensity working class white voters who turned out in larger than expected numbers for Trump in 2016 and 2020."

"Now he's trying to have it both ways—claiming special expertise and identifying likely voters and blaming low turnout among Republican voters for his errors in 2022," he continued. "In fact, that turnout could not possibly explain the massive errors in some of Cahaly's 2022 polls."

Prior to the midterms, Abramowitz correctly predicted that Democrats would lose their House majority but said a loss of the Senate was "less certain" and argued that Democrats would likely not "experience a shellacking" in either chamber.

Cahaly's 2022 misfires included predictions that Republicans Mehmet Oz and Blake Masters would win their Senate races in Pennsylvania and Arizona, while GOP candidates Tudor Dixon and Mark Ronchetti would win gubernatorial elections in Michigan and New Mexico.

Trafalgar Group polls that correctly predicted 2022 election winners often included wildly inaccurate margins of victory, skewed heavily in favor of Republicans.

Newsweek has reached out to the Republican National Committee for comment.