There are basically three ways that the presidential polls can be wrong. The first is that they have the wrong models for who is actually going to vote. So, for example, they may be underestimating Latino or black or Millennial turnout. Conversely, they could be overestimating those groups and not giving Trump enough credit for mobilizing white working class voters who never warmed to Mitt Romney. In these cases, the pollsters are accurately collecting people’s voting preferences but failing to weigh them correctly. This happened in 2012, as analysts did not anticipate that blacks would respond to suppression efforts by having, for the first time ever, a higher turnout percentage than whites.
The second way the polls could be wrong is actually a combination of two related things. One is that there’s some kind of disparity among Trump and Clinton voters in terms of who will respond to pollsters. It could be that Trump voters are just less likely to answer the phone and take the time to go through a litany of questions. Or, it could be that its the Millennials who are disproportionately uncooperative with survey-takers.
There could also be a lot of people who aren’t honest about who they’ll vote for. There are women who aren’t telling their husbands that they’ll be voting for Clinton. Are they going to be honest with a pollster? What if their husband is sitting next to them on the couch? At the same time, there are Trump voters who don’t want to admit that they’re willing to overlook his racism and misogyny. If these people basically balance out, the polls will be accurate, but what if they don’t?
The final way the polls could be wrong is if they simply cannot account for the difference in quality between the Democratic and Republican Get Out the Vote operations. There’s some reason to believe that Obama’s turnout operation was so superior to Romney’s that it added a few points to his margin and largely explains why Obama outperformed the polls.
Most of these possibilities are more likely to favor Clinton. She has the better turnout operation. She has the benefit of an aroused and angry Latino population that wants to punish Trump. She doesn’t have to do much to exceed expectations for black and Millennial turnout. There’s a big universe of people out there who might not want to admit that they’re supporting her, either because their husbands don’t approve or because they’ve always voted Republican and live in conservative communities.
But there are also Trump voters who are ashamed to admit that they support him. There are a lot of people who never voted before but got involved because of Trump’s campaign.
On the whole, though, especially when considering Trump’s non-existent ground game, I have to say that the odds are better that the polls are underestimating Clinton’s support rather than the reverse.
My main caveat for this is that Trump is coming out of a very low point for his campaign, and the polls may be a kind of nadir for him. It’s a problem because a lot of voting has already happened, but I wouldn’t be shocked if he’s recovered a bit from his low by Election Day. In that case, the polls won’t be wrong because they’ll continue to tighten.
It’s still hard for me to even make a worst case scenario where Trump is actually going to do far better than the polls predict.
I have felt for some time that Trump will motivate more to vote against him, than for him.
Trump’s demographic base is smaller, and if you look at the ranks of those ‘offended by Trump’, you are talking about women, blacks, Latinos, muslims, janitorial workers – it’s like 3/4 of the electorate is in the ‘offended by Trump’ segment.
By the numbers, I can’t imagine there are enough angry white men to counteract the numbers of the offended. Especially since angry white men are pretty much all GOP voters already.
But hey, we’ll find out soon enough…
I tend to agree and also wonder how much of his own turnout he’s going to depress by talking so much about a stolen election. I wonder if he gets that these people truly believe him. He’s like God to some of them. If he says it, it must be true.
No wonder it’s like nirvana for a narcissist like Trump to hang out with those people. No wonder he wants as little time as possible outside his pathetic bubble of bullshit.
The most salient evidence Trump could do better to my mind is the senate. Hes running 4-5 points behind the gop candidates. Theres a clear break between Trump and generic republican that could make itself felt on election day.
Or not. Just a possibility.
No question the race has tightened. Clinton’s chances in Florida haven’t been this low since October 9. In Ohio, since October 4.
Still, her chances are 83.6% or higher in VA, WI, CO, PA, and NH – and those are all she needs.
I wonder what’s causing that.
The only people I know that are voting for Trump live in Ohio and are women. I can’t explain it.
It’s pretty much noise. The national polling is volatile because of the vast number of polls being conducted. State polling has been remarkably stable:
http://election.princeton.edu/history-of-meta-analysis/
Given many Trump voters appear to be authoritarian misogynists, it wouldn’t be too surprising if many of their wives/children are afraid to tell them (and pollsters) they are voting Hillary.
There are also two opposing theories about how the race will play out over the last 10 days. One theory, seemingly championed by statisticians like Sam Wang, is that there is a tendency to “revert to the mean” after Trump has suffered a dip due to some outrage or other.
The other theory, which I tend to prefer, is the momentum effect of Hillary being in a clear lead and seeming to be the almost inevitable winner in more and more people’s minds. Why bother voting if the outcome is a foregone conclusion and the vote is rigged in any case – could be a demotivating factor disproportionately effecting a more demoralised Trump voting base.
I would also be interested in comparing data on “likely voters” – people who say they are going to vote – and the number of people who actually end up voting. With the best will in the world a voter who genuinely intended voting may for one reason or another, actually end up not doing so.
Do “likely voter” screens adjust for people who say they have already voted early? A vote in the bag is worth more than a lot of good intentions. Hillary’s ground game and early voter lead could become more and more crucial if the general perception grows that she is going to win bigly..
I can tell you anecdotally that some women are fearful of speaking truthfully about their vote. My dad expected my mom to vote for Nixon when I was a kid. I heard her whisper to a friend in “68 that she didn’t (or maybe was thinking of voting for Humphrey — it’s hard to remember, I was quite young). Then in “72 she told him she had voted for McGovern and he hit the roof, ranting and raving about how she had cancelled his vote, as if it had been some treasonous act of tremendous disloyalty.
Weirdly enough, my parents survived some really rough years (which included DV and infidelity on both of their parts) and are actually pretty happy today. My dad now watches MSNBC and lectures his conservative tennis buddies in their Arizona retirement community. He still has tendencies to think in black and white ways. He and I have recently come into conflict and for the life of him he can’t seem to see that I have a right to my own opinion.
Alas, all of this is a digression. There are still, unfortunately, men as primitive as my dad was in the late “60s and early “70s who truly believe their wives have less right express an opinion or cast a vote than they do.
My father and mother were both Republicans. Until he died.
Then my mother announced she’d never voted Republican for president, as we all thought. She told me the same night she voted for Gene McCarthy.
Booman Tribune ~ Comments ~ How Could the Polls Be Wrong?
According to Gallup’s on those claiming that they “Will definitely vote (“10″)” and comparing with Voter turnout in the United States presidential elections about 70% of those ends up voting.
Bloomberg’s new story Inside the Trump Bunker, With 12 Days to Go tells us exactly what they are doing to get out their vote and prove the polls wrong: they developed a Facebook model to contact “their” voters: Brad Parscale, a San Antonio marketing entrepreneur, who built the Trump family websites on the cheap, developed the Facebook campaign. Then Rience Prebus gave them the RNC voter data, which Trump now has in his hot little hands.
Parscale admits in the article that their extensive private voter polling tells pretty much the same story as Nate Silver’s 538.com model, which currently has Trump losing the election by 6.1%, except that 538.com is about 1 week behind because they’re relying on public polling data, while the Trump campaign is relying on private polling data.
So, essentially BOTH campaigns admit that that Hillary is winning and the Trump campaign admits that Nate Silver is right about the polls. They just think they can turn out enough of their base voters to win on election day – through social media.
The key part is that, instead of normal voter contact like Hillary is doing, the Trump campaign is relying on Facebook contacts. So, this will be the first campaign to rely solely on social media to get out the vote. Will this affect how accurate the polls wind up compared with the result? Nobody knows at present.
This doesn’t sound like a terrible idea. People are interacting on Facebook and then a Trump newsfeed update reminds them to go vote. I think the Democrats need to do more of this in the future.
Of course the giant gaping hole in this entire marketing strategy is obvious from the start: it’s likely that all the Trumpkins will react positively to this Facebook campaign, which is good for motivating your base.
But, it does nothing whatever to turn out independent swing voters in suburban Philadelphia or Tampa. Hillary has her lists, and she’s relying on a professional campaign staff in every battleground state to target and get out the vote, mostly by calling people on the phone. She has a different model entirely than Trump. And her base is significantly bigger than Trumps.
If he’s not appealing to moderate swing voters, and his base is smaller, he’s in trouble if Democrats all turn out and vote for Hillary.
Trump knows this, so his strategy is to suppress base turnout among key Democratic constituencies. You’ve seen this in the debates. He’s trying to suppress turnout among millennial women by attacking Bill Clinton’s alleged sexual assaults on women, among Haitian immigrants by pointing to some allegedly controversial things the Clinton Foundation has done in Haiti, etc.
This is certainly innovative, even if bizarre. A candidate is normally not a credible messenger for such attacks because partisans for the opposing candidate come across to Democratic voters like trolling behaviour. So, doesn’t seem like this would work.
I guess the RNC provided them with 13.5 million persuadable voters. The problem with contacting them via Facebook exclusively is that 1/3 of adults don’t have accounts. Plus a number of those persuadable voters are probably already planning to vote. I know in swing states the difference may be a few hundred thousand here and a few ten thousand there, but I think the yield for this large list is going to be very small.
This “social media” campaign is difficult for me to quantify because (like almost all of my facebook contacts) I literally have no facebook contact with Trump supporters.
I have not put a lot of election stuff on my feed. In fact, I don’t think I’ve put anything at all on my feed for more than 3 months because what little I did put up caused a reaction far beyond the initial cause. Sort of like a political dynamic system where the tiniest deviation from established norms causes massive disruptions to time and space calculations. I doubt that the experience was very different for most engaged people on either side.
It doesn’t seem very effective to me since I know a lot of people who aren’t on Facebook or Twitter at all. Remember when not everyone had a cell phone?
inexplicably my mother and my little sister are Trump people, ever since they moved to SW MO they’ve been swallowed whole by the dittoheads
It’s hard to resist the power of the pods.
Why in the world would anyone voluntarily move to SW Missouri? I spent the longest 10 years of my life outside Humansville, Mo. I haven’t been back since 1969.
they wanted to be farmers and land is cheaper out there
“…land is cheaper there.”
There’s a reason for that: it’s in SW Misery.
I live in a central county and it’s redder than the SW which is typically (and correctly) seen as the most batshit, insane part of the state.
The entire state has moved that way in the 20 years I’ve lived here. Can’t wait to bolt.
I’m sorry but that just sounds like bullshit to me — typical Trump in that it’s being done on the cheap, at the last minute, by totally-unqualified people he met through the seamy world of creepy real-estate types and fringe characters he’s “friends” with — whereas, as we know from four years ago, the Obama team was using state-of-the art AWS-based technology developed in Palo Alto which has only improved since then.
I know there’s always that randomizing factor of “new media/Internet technology” that always requires anyone making an assessment to say, sure; this could work…it’s brand new etc. (as was happening over and over during the first Internet bubble). But in this case, I mean…yeah; a bunch of people get Facebook messages. Josh Marshall has already been making fun of Facebook messages he gets from Trump and how amateurish they are, offering “certificates” and “Trump cards” if you send money (like it’s a Spider-Man fan club or something). I just can’t take it seriously.
I mean, it’s Trump — there isn’t a single instance in his entire life of him getting something right. (And I’ve been walking past those awful, cheeseball buildings for decades; I know what I’m talking about.)
All I can say is from my own experience it looks like the Clintonistas are doing similar things, quite effectively. I am getting hammered on all my devices, on every platform, 24 hours a day, by dem. requests for money, time, votes. I doubt Trump has any advantage in the cyber-war at all, except maybe that given him by Putin’s hackers.
No, agreed! That’s what I’m saying. Everything Trump touches is handled with arrogance, ineptitude, ignorance, a decades-old sensibility, aesthetic ugliness and an attempt to skim off the top.
All of which apparently uniquely qualify him to plunder the GOP and steal their customers; the whole Right-wing media and political ecology had evolved into a business model Trump understood better than they did themselves, scalping the rubes. Trump to GOP:
Not sayin’ there isn’t also abundant “arrogance, ineptitude, ignorance” etc but it potentially messes with GOP for years to come. It is all about the money with them; always the money. The GOP was a massive ‘for-profit’ enterprise for all concerned and Trump just shouldered his way in to the trough. Good luck getting him out of there, like a pig in the feed shed.
For example:
Fleecing the rubes; Trump is just muscling in on their action.
That was my impression as well.
If Trump and his four-man operation aren’t spending $70 million/month on television ads, they are lining their pockets.
Agree. This seems like a response to the question, “where did my money go” from disgruntled donors. “Well, it went into something you can’t see feel or touch, and its a secret. But believe you me it was money well spent.” At least Romney’s team built Orca. It didn’t work, but they built it.
It appears the US is headed for some constitutional crises, mostly around erecting boundaries against an activist minority seeking disproportionate power. Freezing SCOTUS, unfunded government, voter suppression; these are all part of one, undemocratic strategy that dares not speak its own name. It will be ugly and shameful and last at least until 2024 and we’ll need a two-hour shower before it’s over but we’ll probably shake of our Know-nothings and press on toward our collective national destiny.
My only real concern is the neo-conservative foreign policy freaks of both parties.
Democrats and Hillary’s social media presence is pretty robust. Messages on her page and Twitter account multiple times per day, that are timely with her message and the daily news.
Even if Trump is doing this right, I don’t think they’re doing any better or worse than the Clinton campaign. That’s of course making a big assumption that Trump is doing something the right way
Sounds like a sound investment for the purpose of continuing to fleece people after Election Day.
My sane mind is like…pffft! No way can Trump win! No numbers will convince me that he has a shadow of a prayer of a smidgen of a chance. No way.
Then my crazy brain, the one that sees a monster in a pile of clothes on the floor in the middle of the night says…are you sure?
I cannot wait for this election to be done. Hillary wins…right?
Yeah. You’re not alone. I have to catch myself, thinking its 2004 and we’ve convinced ourselves that we have this superior ground game that the Republicans don’t have, and it turns out they had an even bigger ground game that we didn’t want to notice because it involved using evangelical churches to get out the vote. Then I do get nervous. Then I remind myself that in 2004 the polls never really had us ahead and this ground game is about maintaining a lead, not catching up.
It does seem like its taking forever for this to end.
It’s like driving across Nebraska……how can it go on this long?
.
It is the hardest part of the campaign. These last twelve days are killer. In 2008, I had Al Giordano to keep me sane. In 2012, Obama had a small but steady lead that seemed clear after the blip of the first debate had faded. I also really trusted his team, plus all the polls had him ahead. Still, I sighed a huge breath of relief when the election results rolled in.
This cycle, Clinton seems well ahead but Trump, for all his insanity, is like a zombie. Stab him as many times as you will, he just keeps coming back. Also, he makes Romney, McCain and even shrub seem like true statesmen. The prospect of this lunatic with an obvious personality disorder in the White House is too much to contemplate. The thought seriously blows my circuits — not in a good way.
Trump’s chances of winning cannot be modeled as they are dependent on black swan events (like another 9/11)
that cannot be quantified with any accuracy.
There examples of candidates making up ground in the last 10 days (see 1968), but the circumstances were very different.
If you want to scare yourself, though, Nixon led Humphrey by 10 10 days out.
He won by .5
For what it’s worth Sam Wang over at Princeton has HRC as a 99% likely winner up from 98% yesterday.
Nate Silver posted about systemic bias in polling, and I think that is the right concern.
In 2012 that bias was largely a function of the shift away from landlines to cell phones, and as a result the young and the minority vote was missed. This problem largely has been addressed. I continue to regard all internet polling with suspicion however.
2014 was not really a surprise. Senate races are predictable if you combine Polling and PVI – red states break late for the GOP and blue states break late for Dems. This makes me suspicious of the very good numbers in Arizona (where polling has been consistently too optimistic for Dems since 2000) and in Texas. What is out in red states is white, and has voted Republican before. Will they vote? The argument they won’t strikes me as an echo of 2012 where Republicans said minorities wouldn’t. The best prediction of future behavior is past behavior. What is out in red states has tended to vote before and tended to vote GOP.
The Generic House numbers are very disappointing – suggesting this win will be the product of a terrible GOP nominee. We should take the Senate – not taking it given the disparity in seats that are up would be a significant disappointment.
The Florida Early Vote no longer looks as positive, though because of timing differences between 2016 and 2012 it is tough to draw a parallel.
I still think the third party vote collapses late, and as a result Clinton wins by around 10. But the dream of a larger victory that start a GOP Civil War is fading. If the GOP holds the House by 15-20 they will have less problems governing. So even if we don’t take the House the margin still matters.
This election strikes me as 1988 in reverse. In ’88 Dukakis closed late – and that worries me here.
Agreed. I’d really like to see Dems take the Senate, but my hopes are being checked by the reality of the tough polls.
Steve Schale seems to be pegging the Florida results as pretty much 2012-level.
Never thought the house was in play, personally. Senate still looks like 50-51 seats for the Democrats.
He backed off a bit.
The people I talk to in the Tampa area are less certain than they were.
Also, I think this cycle should lay to rest the idea that favorability and generic ballot polling is particularly accurate (it may be precise, however, with the appropriate adjustments).
Generic congressional ballot: D+5
Democratic favorable-unfavorable: -2
Republican favorable-unfavorable: -23