Elsa/Getty Images
- In a series of polls taken from August through October, certain sports fans were more heavily linked to presidential candidates than others.
- Self-identified NASCAR fans were the most likely to say they plan on voting for President Donald Trump, while NBA and college basketball fans were the most heavily linked to Democratic nominee Joe Biden.
- Others broke more evenly, such as NHL hockey fans and those who said they watch NFL and college football.
- Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.
Which sports Americans follow correlate to how they plan on voting for in the 2020 election, according to a series of polls conducted by Insider in conjunction with SurveyMonkey from August to October.
This chart shows the difference between the margin of support for Trump or Biden among the given subset of respondents and the overall margin of support among likely voters as a whole:
NFL and college football fans, for example — a bloc President Donal Trump targeted in his campaign’s exaggerated messaging about the president “saving” the powerhouse Big 10 conference’s season in the Midwest — are actually the most evenly split fan base in the polling.
This breakdown comes from an aggregation of nine polls taken between August 8 and October 12. All told, the polls combined to 10,077 respondents, 8,623 of whom indicated they were registered to vote and 8,321 of whom said they would likely do so. Respondents were asked about their intentions of who they would vote for in November as well as a number of other questions.
- NFL and college football fans are just 1 percentage point more likely to support Biden, the Democratic nominee, over Trump, indicating that fans of those sports look pretty similar to the overall voting public as a whole.
- The most Biden-leaning fanbase was basketball fans, with those preferring to watch the NBA or college hoops 17 percentage more likely to say they back Biden than the overall margin.
- Soccer fans, the smallest audience we polled at just 7% of likely voters, are 11 percentage points more likely to mark down Biden as their preferred candidate.
- MLB baseball fans, which one might assume are older and more conservative, are actually 4 percentage points more likely to say they’re voting for Biden.
- Football fans are smack dab in the middle at just a 1% lean toward Biden, and they amount to 31% of likely voters in the response pool, the largest in the sample.
- NHL hockey fans lean Trump at 2 percentage points more likely than the average respondent to say they plan on reelecting the president. Hockey fans accounted for 12% of our likely voter sample.
- PGA Tour golf fans are 7 percentage points more likely to say they’ll pull the lever for Trump, making up 9% of the likely voter pool.
- Finally, NASCAR fans are the most concentrated in one camp, with the racing supporters 27 percentage points more likely to say they’ll vote for Trump. They composed 8% of that likely voter sample.
SurveyMonkey Audience polls from a national sample balanced by census data of age and gender. Respondents are incentivized to complete surveys through charitable contributions. Generally speaking, digital polling tends to skew toward people with access to the internet. SurveyMonkey Audience doesn’t try to weight its sample based on race or income. Polling data collected 1,150 respondents August 7, 1,106 respondents on August 11, 1,128 respondents August 21-22, 1,073 respondents August 29, 1,161 respondents September 4, 1,107 respondents September 15, 1,017 respondents September 18, 1,122 respondents September 28, 1,176 respondents October 5, and 1,130 respondents on October 12. All polls carried approximately a 3 percentage point margin of error individually.