Mike Pence dropped out. Ranked choice polling can tell us where his voters will go.

Mike Pence announced over the weekend that he is suspending his campaign for president. Pence’s move comes on the heels of withdrawals from Will Hurd, Larry Elder, and Francis Suarez. The natural question for politicos and pundits is how this shrinking field might impact the race. In other words, where will Pence, Hurd, Elder, and Suarez voters turn? 

In a constantly changing field of candidates, ranked choice polling helps us make sense of the likely impacts of candidate withdrawals in real time. 

By simply asking voters for their backup choices, ranked choice polling provides the best insights on who voters will support when their favorite candidate drops out. (In fact, the highly regarded Iowa Poll from the Des Moines Register and NBC News also uses this approach!)

In our recent poll with WPA Intelligence, Pence earned 4.4% of voters’ first-choice preferences. His supporters liked Tim Scott, Nikki Haley, and Vivek Ramaswamy as their second choices, so we expect those candidates to gain the most. Hurd, Elder, and Suarez each had less than 1% of first choices, so their departures have less of an impact. 

If we eliminate Pence, Elder, Hurd, and Suarez from our poll data and assume each of their supporters would vote for their highest-ranked choice who is still in the race, we arrive at these projected first-choice preferences. 

Projected candidate vote totals, national poll

All candidates gain some support from the four candidate withdrawals, but the biggest beneficiaries are likely Haley, DeSantis, and Scott. Among the leading candidates, Trump gains the least, increasing his support by just 0.4 percentage points.

In the early state sample, Chris Christie is by far the biggest beneficiary. He gains 2.1 percentage points due to the candidate withdrawals, more than twice as much as the gains by any other candidate. 

Projected candidate vote totals, early states 

When we use the poll data to run full RCV tabulations, these withdrawals do not impact the final winners. Just like in our September poll, Trump and Haley would advance to the final round of an RCV race and Trump would win by a large margin. In early states, DeSantis continues to eke out a narrow final-round victory over Trump, but it remains within the poll’s margin of error – making it effectively a toss-up. 

As the field continues to shrink and pundits speculate on how – and whether – it will impact the state of the race, just look to the latest ranked choice poll for the answers!