The Democrats better hope the pollsters aren't understating Trump's support again
The latest polls have the Trump-Harris race basically deadlocked. Harris is ahead in the RCP poll average by a margin of only 1.4 points.
That doesn’t sound like bad news for Harris, but it is two respects. First, if Trump and Harris are about even in national polls, the advantage in the electoral college goes to Trump.
J.T. Young, writing in The Hill, reminds us that Biden beat Trump by 4.4 points in the 2020’s popular vote, yet prevailed in the Electoral College only by winning Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, and Wisconsin by less than 77,000 votes combined. And in 2016, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by 2.1 percentage points but lost the electoral vote.
Second, Trump outperformed his polling in the past two presidential elections. In 2016, Clinton led Trump in the final polls by 4 points. As noted, her actual popular-vote margin was 2.1.
Similarly, in 2020, Biden led in the final polls by 8 points. His margin in real voting was 4.4.
In Florida, Biden led by 3 points in the polls but lost the state by 4. In Ohio, he trailed Trump by only 1 point, but lost by 8
In Michigan, he led by 5.5 points but won by only 3. In Wisconsin, Biden led by 9 points but won by less than 1.
If Trump outperforms the polls in this election the way he did in the past two, he almost surely will win.
Should we expect him to outperform the polls again? We should unless (1) pro-Trump voters are more willing than before to tell pollsters they intend to vote for Trump or (2) pollsters have figured out how to compensate for the reluctance of pro-Trump voters to disclose their intentions.
Are pro-Trump voters being more honest with pollsters this year? That depends on the reasons why, apparently, they haven’t been fully honest in the past.
Two possible reasons come to mind. First, they dislike pollsters, viewing them as an extension of the mainstream media they don’t trust. Second, they are embarrassed to admit they intend to vote for Trump.
As to the first reason, I see no basis for concluding that pro-Trump voters like pollsters more now than they did during the last two presidential elections.
As to reluctance to admit an intention to vote for Trump, it seems to me that, if anything, voters might be more reluctant to make such an admission this time around. Consider what’s happened since the last of the 2000 polls.
Trump claimed he won the election but never proved that he did. Trump called on supporters to come to Washington and attempt to prevent the certification of his defeat. Trump improperly possessed classified documents and gave federal agents the runaround (and in my view obstructed justice) when they tried to retrieve them. Trump was convicted of a felony (albeit a bogus one).
If voters have been reluctant to admit an intention to vote for Trump in the past, there’s still plenty of reason — arguably more than before — for the reluctance.
The other question is whether pollsters have figured out how to compensate for not getting truthful responses from survey participants and/or how to get pro-Trump voters to talk to them. I don’t know the answer. However, it’s unclear to me how they could do this and, if they could, why they didn’t do it between 2016 and 2020.
One thing that is clear: Democrats are very worried that pollsters are once again undercounting Trump’s support:
“Polling has really been seriously damaged since 2016. And that’s [why] one of the truths is that Trump is going to be tough [to beat] in Pennsylvania, and that’s absolutely the truth,” Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) said when asked whether he’s worried pollsters may be undercounting Trump’s support in his home state.
One Democratic senator who requested anonymity acknowledged both Clinton and President Biden were doing better in the polls against Trump in 2016 and 2020, respectively, than Harris is performing right now.
“That’s ominous. There’s no question that is concerning, but you’re working as hard as you can work, no matter what.
By “hard work,” the Democrats mostly mean winning the voter turnout battle. My sense, though, is that both sides in a presidential election do about equally well when it comes to turnout. Certainly, the Trump-led GOP seems to have done fine in that regard. Otherwise, Trump wouldn’t have outperformed the polls.
I understand that this time, Trump is relying heavily on Charlie Kirk and Turning Point for his get-out-the-vote operation. Some are skeptical of the decision to rely on untested groups such as Turning Point.
So let’s call turnout a wild card in this election. But looking at the cards in the regular deck, I’m starting to think that Trump has the better hand.