OUR VIEW: Results of our little reader survey

Published 10:34 pm Tuesday, November 3, 2020

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If you’re reading this, then know you’ve finally made it. It’s Election Day, and hopefully at some point in the next 24 hours, we’ll know who the next president is. (Due to all the absentee ballots, we might still be wondering when we wake up Wednesday.)

Over the weekend, we posted a reader survey on our website about the election, and most of the questions focused on the presidential race.

We’ll be the first to admit that the survey is nowhere near scientific and shouldn’t be compared at all to polling data used by some of the top-notch websites trying to determine the presidential race. It’s not even close.

But it is fun to look at it.

We had 203 total responses, which is well down from our COVID-19 community surveys. We figure the pandemic prompted more responses due to the unknown and less people are as open about who they’re voting for. (We will note that we asked zero identifying questions though.) Only 15 people who took the survey work or live outside of Troup County, so most were locals. Sixty-two percent of survey takers were female, and most who took the survey identified their race as white (91 percent.) The age breakdown was all over the map, with most taking it in the 30 to 39 age range. However, every ten-year age group between 19-29 to 70-79 resulted in 9 percent of results.

Most, 74.4 percent, of people who participated had already voted. Only 25 percent of people who took it said they’d vote in person.

Most people who took the survey — 62.6 percent — identified as Republican, and, as expected, 62.9 percent of survey respondents said they were supporting Donald Trump for president.   A whopping 71.5 percent of respondents said they would only vote for one political party this year, with Republicans (50.5 percent) outpacing Democrats (21 percent), though as we said above, more Republicans took the survey too.

Fifty-one percent of people said the economy was the most important issue in the presidential election. The COVID-19 pandemic (15.5 percent) was a distant second.

Georgia is one of the closest races in the country for president this year, and it even could ultimately decide the race. Most survey respondents believe Trump will win a close race in Georgia (48 percent) and 30.2 percent believe Trump will win Georgia in a landslide. Only 19.8 percent believe Biden will win a close race in Georgia and 2 percent believe Biden will win Georgia in a landslide.

Nationally, 33 percent of respondents expect Donald Trump wins the Electoral College in a landslide and 30.5 percent believe Trump wins a close election. Only about 36 percent of survey takers think Joe Biden wins — 24.4 percent have him winning with a close race and some (12.2 percent) believe Biden wins in a landslide.

As far as local races go, almost nine out of ten believe they are somewhat informed or very informed in the sheriff’s race. About three-fourths feel somewhat informed or very informed in the county commission races.

Most respondents (45 percent) will be utilizing The LaGrange Daily News for election results, so thank you for that. We’re going to have live coverage of local races all night.

We appreciate everyone who took the survey, and look forward to seeing how close the results are to what actually happens.

Of course, most of you said on the survey that you don’t trust polling (78.8 percent), so we’d advise taking all of this with a grain of salt.

Happy Election Day everyone!