Cahaly is a veteran Republican strategist, the norm-busting Southern pollster was born in Georgia to a Banker and Teacher, he developed obsession for politics as a child and studied it at the University of South Carolina. He was mentored by a pollster, Rod Shealy, an acolyte of Republican strategist Lee Atwater, before he eventually started his firm, Trafalgar Group.
He runs this firm alone and has been doing surveys on behalf of clients since 2006. In 2016, Trafalgar was the firm whose state surveys most effectively predicted Trump’s win. Cahaly even called the exact number of Electoral College votes that Trump and Hillary Clinton would receive — 306-227 — although his prediction of which states would get them there was just slightly off. He is also making a strong prediction for Trump’s victory in this year’s highly contentious battle between Trump and Biden.
There is a universal lack of validation of his work in the US community of polling research and among his peers. The main sticking point is his lack of transparency about his methods. A professor of communications data and political science at the University of Michigan, John Pasek, said that without a sense of the methods the firm uses to reach survey respondents, it’s not possible to rely on the numbers.
Cahaly does not buy into the criticism of his methods and predictions and he doesn’t seem to care whether he’s abiding by the best practices of the American Association of Public Opinion Research. He has said in a report that he feels no need to reveal his techniques owing to the widespread doubt about his work. According to him, he has developed something that is different from what other people do. “Just judge us by whether we get it right,” he said.
In 2010, Cahaly was arrested for robocalling but was later absolved of the charges after he successfully sued a state law enforcement agency leading to the termination of the Robocall prohibition law. In 2018, Cahaly amassed a successful track record polling Senate and Governor’s races including surveys that correctly foretold Ron DeSantis and Rick Scott’s wins in Florida. He has continued to see strong Trump support among the voters and he thinks other pollsters are underestimating their importance like they did in the 2016 election.
He thinks it is presumptuous for pollsters to assume they have a representative sample of voters just because they are adhering to scientific methods considering the country’s political divide and the unwillingness of Americans to communicate with each other from across the breach of suspicion. He said in an interview “Lee Atwater drilled into everyone around me that you have to get out of the head of politicos and into the head of Joe Six-Pack to get to know what the average people think, and to that, I like to talk to average people.”
“I like to follow up polling calls and chat with people for 30 minutes,” he added. Cahaly has predicted Trump’s victory once again with published electoral college vote for Trump and Biden in his recent tweet. He is the one person who will confidently say “I told you so” if Trump emerges victorious in the recently concluded election.
See the tweet below.
Our new @trafalgar_group
#2020Election #Georgia #poll conducted 10/31 – 11/2 shows consistent Trump lead:
49.7% @realDonaldTrump,
45.4% @JoeBiden,
2.6% @Jorgensen4POTUS,
1.0% Other Party Candidate,
1.3% Und. See Report: https://t.co/4y55rQ2asb pic.twitter.com/tulc4vPbIP— Robert C. Cahaly (@RobertCahaly) November 3, 2020
