We laughed at the Republicans’ conspiracy theories about skewed polls, but to a certain degree it is a natural tendency to doubt news that you don’t like. With the polls tightening to an uncomfortable degree, you will begin to see Democrats raise questions about methodology and bias, too. There is, however, a difference. We have reached the end game of the election cycle and the pollsters are now applying a “likely voter” screen. Reputable polling outfits will give you both numbers. In most cycles, and this one is no exception, the Democrats will do better in the overall poll than they will do in the likely voter screen. This is simply because Democrats get more support from younger voters and from voters on the margins of society, both of whom are less politically engaged than average. Measuring the likelihood that someone will vote can be done in a variety of ways, but if the methodology is solid it will pick up on the mood of each party’s marginal voters. If it’s done poorly, it will pick up on the mood of the parties’ bases. If Democrats were enervated by Obama’s debate performance, they may have seemed less likely to vote when interviewed, but any Democrat who is interested enough to watch a debate is probably going to vote. If they are charged up by Biden’s performance, they still aren’t much more likely to vote than they were before the debate.
What matters is whether any minds were changed and whether a few people were inspired to vote who might have sat the election out. That’s why debate coverage matters more than the actual debate, because the audience is much larger for the coverage and it includes precisely the kind of people who are not reliable voters.
So, it’s not a conspiracy to say that I am a bit wary of putting too much stock in any individual likely voter screen. The way I look at it is that the president is not going to do as well as he should because the Democrats vote less reliably than the Republicans, so a good poll of the general public will overstate his support. However, calculating just how much support he will lose is much more of an art than a science. That’s why the best thing to do is to look at the aggregate of all polling rather than to focus on any single poll. Hopefully, all the polls combined will tell an accurate story.
Biden lifted the Democrats’ spirits with a fun and satisfying debate, but he can’t get people to the polls by himself, and neither can the president. It’s their campaign team and volunteers like you who can mitigate the Republicans’ advantage with “likely voters.”
