Once again, pollsters have proven to be ineffective at predicting trends in major elections after they continued to claim President Trump would be left for dead in his matchup with Joe Biden.
“We’re all trying to figure out where we go from here,” Mark Blumenthal, a pollster, told The New York Times.
There are a number of theories as to how they could get these elections so wrong so often. As we noted last week, many Americans who support President Trump are simply not as forthcoming as their Democrat neighbors and have a distrust of these polling institutions.
“It’s very difficult to get men who are 45 and under on the phone, and when they get on the phone and figure out it’s a pollster, they hang up or… prank them,” Rep. Guy Reschenthaler told the Financial Times.
Republicans claim there’s an inherent fear they would face social odium for backing a president so reviled in the media. Another theory is that pollsters want to get mentioned in major newspapers and news channels and assume the best way to promote their companies is to give these outlets what they want.
RealClearPolitics showed Biden benefiting from 51 percent of the vote compared to Trump’s 44 percent.
The Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll predicted Biden would carry the women and senior votes by 20 and 23 points, respectively. The AP reported that Biden won the women’s vote by 11 percent and actually lost seniors to Trump by 3 percent.
And, as we had noted in last week’s Trends Journal, the polls had Biden beating Trump by 8 to 10 percent. While final tally is still being counted, Biden secured 50 percent of the vote, and Trump pulled in 48 percent, which is a 2 percent plurality.
The polls also projected Texas would be a tossup, but Trump easily won the Lone Star State by about 8 percent.
Many political observers said Trump stumbled in the first debate against Biden, and then he was diagnosed with COVID, which also seemed to leave him vulnerable to Biden’s attack on his handling of the virus outbreak.
But Trump supporters said the president turned the corner and made a gallant effort in the waning days of the campaign, focusing mainly on swing states such as Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan.
It should be noted that in the 2016 race for the White House, the polls had Trump losing those states to Hillary Clinton.
And while the polls indicate Trump lost those three states to Biden, the president, at this time, is contesting those results and others, including Nevada and Arizona.
TRENDPOST: The political polling methodology is 20th century antiquated. According to the American Association for Public Opinion Research, it is increasingly difficult for polling companies to even attract participation. The response rate to pollsters fell from a 36 percent in 1996 to 6 percent in 2018.
Indeed, these are the same crew of pollsters that had Hillary Clinton easily defeating Donald Trump in the 2016 Presidential Reality Show®. As evidenced, we called Trump the winner in May 2016 and reaffirmed his win in August when Clinton was ahead in the polls by some 10 percent.
We suggest that Trump’s assertion that the negative polling numbers suppressed voter turnout for him does have merit. Indeed, with the polls showing for several months that he had no chance of winning, it is reasonable to assess that those who would have voted for him did not go to the polls because they thought he didn’t have a chance of winning.
TRENDPOST: On Saturday, after Associated Press, MSNBC, and CNN (not the U.S. government) called the race for Biden, Trump wrote in a statement, “We all know why Joe Biden is rushing to falsely pose as the winner, and why his media allies are trying so hard to help him: they don’t want the truth to be exposed.”
Trump said the election is “far from over” as Biden “has not been certified as the winner of any states.”
Yesterday, Attorney General William Barr authorized the Justice Department to look into voting irregularities in the 2020 presidential election.
“Now that the voting has concluded,” Barr wrote, “it is imperative the American people can trust that our elections were conducted in such a way that the outcomes accurately reflect the will of the voters.”
