Polls Are Probably Exaggerating Biden’s Advantage

Trump has created a uniquely poll-resistant political coalition and if pollsters don’t have a plan for this, they’ll underestimate his level of support.

It’s a frustrating reality that Donald Trump is probably doing better in his reelection campaign than the polls are indicating. Steven Shepard of Politico reports that a lot of the pollsters acknowledge that state polling in particular is a problem.

There’s a fairly simple explanation, although it’s composed of several parts. The most important is that a huge gap has opened up in the political opinions of white people based on their level of educational attainment. Less-educated whites are far more inclined to support Donald Trump and far less likely to respond to a political survey request.

This could lead to an undersampling in the best of worlds, but it’s compounded by the fact that Trump consistently rails against the media and the polls, accusing them of dishonest and unfair practices. Therefore, people who follow Trump’s messaging closely are being prompted not to cooperate with reporters and pollsters.

Finally, there’s an element of shame or judgment involved. Trump and his supporters are frequently and with justification accused of harboring racist beliefs. This adds a potential social cost to openly admitting that you intend to vote for the president. This can be offset in some communities where there’s a high social cost for supporting a liberal or pro-choice candidate, but many people are reluctant to admit to friends and family that they prefer Trump to Biden, let alone admit this to a stranger on the telephone.

This problem was recognized as the reason that state polling was off in 2016 even though the larger sample-size national polls were accurate, and the best pollsters have been working to adjust their models ever since. The question is really whether or not they’ve solved it and whether the average of polls is skewed by polling outfits who haven’t made the proper adjustments.

GOP pollster Glen Bolger said he believes a combination of pollsters’ inability to get the right educational mix and to persuade potential Trump voters to respond and answer truthfully to phone polls is pointing their surveys in a slightly Democratic direction.

“I don’t know how big the effect is. I also don’t know what the ratio is between it being ‘shy Trump’ voters and interviewing too many college graduates and not enough non-college grads,” Bolger said. “But I do think those are factors in some of the polls that show a particularly wide lead for Biden at this point in time. And I do think that things will be closer in the states than the polls indicate right now.”

The truth is that Trump has created a uniquely poll-resistant political coalition. If pollsters don’t have a good plan for this, they’ll underestimate his level of support. Of course, it’s possible to overcompensate and skew your poll in the opposite direction, but it’s significant that the pollsters themselves seem to lack total confidence in their results.

Trump’s measured level of support has been cratering over the last several months, and he’s now clearly losing outside the margin of any error, but there’s still a good possibility that he’s in better shape than the numbers suggest.

Fortunately, the experience of 2016 pretty much assures that the Democrats won’t get complacent. It would be hard to feel confident in any case when the polls can vary so much. For example, there are two recent polls out of Michigan, and one has Biden up by two points while the other has him up by sixteen. The prudent thing to do is to assume the closer result is more accurate.

Author: BooMan

Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.

15 thoughts on “Polls Are Probably Exaggerating Biden’s Advantage”

  1. I get a kick out of pollsters who caution about the social implications of saying that you are a Trump supporter. Here in stupid Ohio, you’d have to have a death wish to advertise that you are a Democrat in almost all of the rural parts of the state. I teach a statewide online course on public speaking and have had complaints that I’m not pro-Trump enough. Apparently, you live in a liberal enclave and I say “Bully” for you. That is not what is happening in the rest of the country. I guess I just wish you’d call the 2020 election for Trump already. Based on your 2016 predictions, I’d feel a lot better about Biden’s chances if you would.

    1. I agree Ohio seems like a no win from a few relatives (very small sample) I have there in rural areas south of Toledo.

    2. I admit I’d like to hear some stories. Anyhow, neither is Ohio what is happening in the rest of the country. 2018 didn’t touch you guys but sure touched a lot of other places.

      I do find it concerning that Booman is once again going with landslide/in the bag again.

      1. Well here’s my story, take it for what it’s worth. I can only speak from my little red area of Trump Country in Southwest Ohio, but this time things feel a little bit different here than in 2016. While it is still a virtual certainty that Trump will win in our county, we are seeing some things that give me hope, overall. The fact that COVID keeps us from having an real impact in the field makes this election strange. There will be no canvassing, no Field Director organizing in the county (at least so far); so we are left to do what we can as individuals and as a County party. A few weeks ago we had someone call our office looking for a campaign sign for their yard. This person was not an active party member, but they wanted to show their support for Dem candidates. Our Chair asked them exactly what they were looking for, and they said they wanted the biggest sign they could get, as they lived on busy road which got a lot of traffic. Since we had not yet received any signage from the Biden campaign, our Chair bought, out of her own pocket, a huge banner for them. They put it out a couple of weeks ago. This week, we had a local business owner call out of the blue, another person who was not active in our Party. She had seen the large banner and wanted to know, “Where can I get one of those big signs? I’ll pay whatever it costs.” She also lives on a busy road in a strong Trump neighborhood. So we got her a sign, too. A couple of weeks ago, a voice mail was left at our HQ from an older couple who have never darkened the door of our party office. They said they wanted to write a very sizable check to our Party for however we felt it could best be used to elect Dem candidates and beat Donald Trump.

        There have been other instances of people reaching out who are just fed up with what is going on and are champing at the bit to do something. Unfortunately, with the pandemic still wreaking havoc on any sort of organizing, we are having to be as resourceful and creative in finding ways to get these people engaged, but they are wanting to do whatever they can. These are people who have never been involved in any sort of activism, but they are wanting to be a very public face for Democrats in a very hostile area.

        Finally, there were some students at a local high school who wanted to organize a Black Lives Matter march in their town. They were a little fearful at first, and weren’t sure how that would go, but they did it anyway. So they started using social media, talking with friends and family, and doing the best they could to get word out. And over 1200 people showed up on a beautiful sunny day to peacefully march through their town. It was an amazing spectacle to see in our county. The local police were fantastic in managing the crowd, all the local news stations covered it, and most everyone was shocked at the response. Masks were distributed to anyone who showed up without one, and the march ended at the community center, where the high students spoke and told their stories. It is hard to overstate how unusual something like this is in such a dark red county.

        1. Thanks for this comment. All of these examples are powerful. To me, the last one is both powerful and mysterious. 1,200 people in your town in deep-red Ohio. 35 people in Skowhegan, ME. A march in Howell, MI previously best known as the longtime home of a KKK Imperial Grand Wizard.

          Something’s happening here; what it is ain’t exactly clear.

  2. Less-educated whites are far more inclined to support Donald Trump and far less likely to respond to a political survey request.

    This can cut both ways. A lot of people either don’t participate in polls or aren’t asked to, and yet this group includes the kind of voter who’s fired up to vote against Trump. They’ve been around from the beginning and have generally been ignored by the media as it spent the last three plus years trekking out to diners, again and again, to plumb the opinions of Trump voters. The archetype of a large portion of the anti-Trump voters is the very definition of those who are typically not called by pollsters, and even if they were, wouldn’t bother to participate.

    If anything, the anti-Trump vote is being underestimated.

  3. So long as the bias remains constant and not dependent Trump’s actual level of support , then opening up a poll gap means that Biden is opening up a poll gap. Subtracting a constant from a straight line doesn’t change the slope. So, if at some point Biden was only a couple of points ahead, he is now +10 from whatever that baseline was (though granted we don’t know that number).

  4. I and most of my family stayed up late in 2016. We started out being very confident Hillary had won only to be shattered when the results were in. I and my sister were the two latest to believe we had lost. So I refuse to accept any ten point lead, just no. I never thought we could lose Pa or even Ohio. Now it seems Ohio is solid Trump country. So NY and Ca may be in the book but so much of the Midwest is a turkey shoot. I’m not even sure it is best to campaign there or better in Texas and Georgia. Heaven help us if he does it again.

  5. I’d go with the poll that has Biden +2.
    I’d also assume that if they have Biden up by 2, then it’s really Trump +3.

  6. I’m a little surprised by this take. I would have guessed that the polling advantage was being overstated because of the incomprehensible string of fuckups from Trump in the last two months. A degree of fucking up so extreme that it can’t possibly continue at this level, even with Trump. Of course, we haven’t even gone through the worst of what COVID-19 will bring.

  7. This is your periodic reminder that Herbert Hoover got 40% of the vote, 3+ years into the Great Depression.

    This election will come down to two distinct factions of voters: 1) whether young & left-wing voters show up in large numbers for Biden; and 2) whether 5-10% of 2016 Trump voters abandon him.

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