In response to my post below expressing deep skepticism about whether Donald Trump is really ‘bringing new people into the system’, I heard a few brief mentions that Trump is doing better in exit polls among ‘first time voters.’ This wouldn’t be altogether surprising: he is the outsider candidate. Someone has to win first time voters. And I wouldn’t expect it to be Bush or Marco Rubio.
But here’s the problem. Winning marginally among first time voters doesn’t tell us a huge amount. There’s always a percentage of voters who are first timers. Someone has to win them. Unless the margin is overwhelming, again, it doesn’t tell us much.
One exit poll I looked at was New Hampshire. CNN’s version of the exit polls shows that the question is, Have you ‘ever voted in a republican presidential primary?’ That’s not really the question. As we’ve noted, what you seem to have is higher turnout in the primaries from among the existing GOP general election electorate. That’s not new voters or first time voters – people who weren’t ‘part of the system’ before. That’s just a party ginned up by a hotly contested race and voting in primaries they normally don’t vote in. It could also be people re-registering as Republicans or independents who hadn’t voted in a Republican primary before. But none of these are ‘new’ voters in the sense we’re talking about.
So what did the results show?
Trump won first-timers in a rout. He got 38% of their votes. But they made up only 15% of voters in the New Hampshire primary. And how’d he do among those who’d voted before? He got 35% of those!
In other words, in New Hampshire at least, the whole thing is an epic nothingburger. I’m still looking to see if we can track down evidence of the new Trump voter – reminds me of the Bigfoot Reality TV shows I watch with my sons. So far, no evidence they exist.
