Harry Enten taught me something I didn’t know. Research shows that “from 1988 to 2012, asking people who they believed would win [a presidential election] was more accurate than polls of voter preference of who they wanted to win.” Obviously, that streak ended in 2016.
So, now, the public is giving two very different opinions on these two issues to pollsters. Joe Biden is persistently ahead in both national polls and in key battleground states important for the Electoral College outcome, but people still feel pretty strongly (avg. of polls is 55 percent) that Trump will win reelection.
As Enten notes, this division was evident in 2018:
Gallup asked Americans just before [the 2018 midterms] whether they thought Democrats or Republicans would control the US House after the election. By a 50% to 44% margin, they said Republicans. This came even as Democrats were clear favorites in pretty much every forecast and when that same Gallup poll showed Democrats with an 11-point lead on the generic congressional ballot.
This 2018 poll marked the first time that Americans incorrectly forecasted who would win the House. Americans had previously correctly called every other House election and flip of the chamber in the years Gallup polled (1946, 1948, 2006 and 2010).
Some things we can probably eliminate as possible explanations. Jimmy Carter and Poppy Bush lost reelection, but the people expected that outcome so an assumption that incumbents will win can’t by itself explain why people have a split opinion today. Perhaps people feel like something has changed in the interim, perhaps the existence of right-wing media like Fox News or maybe the impact of the Citizens United Supreme Court case. Maybe they just think Trump is more likely to cheat or that foreign powers intervening on his behalf will put him over the top. It could be that people lack confidence in Joe Biden’s campaign skills, although he just won the nomination almost solely due to his perceived electability. Clearly there is a hangover from 2016 that prevents people from having confidence in the polls.
It’s probably a combination made up of small bits of all these considerations, but the result is that people want Trump gone but don’t believe he actually will be gone. There’s even a whole genre of skepticism that doesn’t believe Trump will voluntarily leave office even if he is defeated.
Yet, people felt similarly in 2018. They doubted the Democrats would win the House even as they gave them an 11-point preference over the Republicans. And it turned out that the House Democrats won in a very convincing fashion.
One thing I think is safe to say is that Trump has a history of doing better at the ballot box than he does in surveys. I guess a lot of people support him without being willing to admit they support him. His supporters are highly skeptical of experts and media, so their cooperation level with pollsters is low, which may also explain some of the disparity. For these reasons, I believe it’s more likely that the polls are skewed against Trump again than that the example of 2018 should give us new confidence in public surveys.
Having said that, if the election were held today, I’m about 99 percent confident that Biden would win, possibly in a shocking landslide that includes states like Texas. But the election is not being held today.
He “has a history of doing better at the ballot box than he does in surveys,” but that history is tied entirely to a span of 9 months in 2016. If anything, the experience of living in Trumpistan (including 2018) would suggest that whatever the hell happened in 2016, it’s unlikely to repeat. Elections with incumbents are almost always referenda on that incumbent. Just because he drew an inside straight in 2016, lots of people seem to think it will happen again.
I’d call it recency bias, but that’s only if you erase 2018 (which a lot of people seem intent on doing).
It concerns me that the media is playing the sexual allegations in a way that isn’t at all skeptical even while continuing to give Trump a free pass on the numerous more credible allegations against him. Not sure Biden can overcome the media’s many biases.
1. because as already mentioned the corporate media will again be on Trump’s side, or most of it anyway
2. because every state with a Republican governor is going to cheat like they’ve never cheated before to keep Dem voters from turning out, or disqualifying them for something bogus, or just not counting honestly.
3. because when they steal the election we’ll get zero help from courts packed with Mitch McConnell’s judges
We heard the same exact thing in 2018 and the Dems won 40 seats. One also has to remember the context in which the next presidential election will be taking place in.
We are on a pace to have a hundred thousand dead Americans by sometime in June. Most likely 150,000 by August, and it is very possible we might be near 200,000 dead Americans come election day.
Moreover, we almost certainly will have somewhere in the range of 10 to 15% unemployment come election day.
It is very difficult of me to conceive that when people ask themselves the question am I better off today then I was 4 years ago come election day, they will gaze out into a landscape that includes 15% unemployment and 200,000 dead Americans and counting and come to the conclusion that yes, yes I am better off than I was four years ago.
It’s not surprising that people feel that Trump could win, even if he’s behind in the polls.
a) Thats what happened last time.
b) The US political system is biased toward Republicans. (See: The right-wing media, the electoral college, the supreme court, citizen’s united,…).
c) Democrats are expert at snatching defeat from the jaws of victory (See: Al Franken, “but her emails!”; and now Tara Reade)
d) Fuck the New York Times political desk. Just please do us all a favor and fire them.
With all these negatives baked in the cake, what we have going for us may not be enough, even if it should be:
a) reality (which has a well-known democratic bias)
b) a majority of the electorate who agrees with democratic ideas,
c) the worst president in history, worse even than the last Repub in the whitehouse, and the one before that , and before that…
They just keep getting worse, and they still keep getting reelected! Who’s next for them, the evil clown from the movie It? I could definitely see him running for the repubs in 2024. And I’d give him 60-40 odds.
I find the notion that Trump supporters are somehow embarrassed to openly display their support for Trump to pollsters or to whomever absolutely ridiculous. Part of being a Trump supporter is taking pride in and making overt shows of, the fact that you are a douchebag. Being a contemporary Republican and thus a Trump supporter means taking pride in being a dick. The notion that they’re somehow embarrassed to convey that to the rest of the world is absurd.
I’m curious, is there any tangible evidence that Trump supporter’s cooperation level with pollsters is low, or that they purposely lie to them? Or is this a conclusion people draw to try and explain polling errors? It seems like this idea has become conventional wisdom, and I just don’t recall seeing where it has been proven, only inferred. Is there any data to support this idea of low cooperation?
Two recent polls show Biden tied with Trump in Texas. Yes: Texas. So maybe we should drop the hangdog, ‘Oh Biden is the wrong guy,’ nonsense and get behind him.
When bad things are happening, it’s human nature to believe bad things will continue to happen.
I think that 2016 caused a lot of people to question not only their assumptions about their relatives, friends, and neighbors, but also their own sense of reality. If you “felt” that Clinton would win, based on all available data, and she didn’t, that self-doubt could continue through 2018 and into the current campaign.