Polling

I’m doubling down. In 2016, against virtually all of the polling data and sophisticated analysis, I predicted Donald Trump would defeat Hillary Clinton 280 to 258. To the shock of the world, he ended up winning 304 to 277. Four years later, the world finds itself again facing an American presidential election in which the vast majority of polling data and prognosticators indicate a Joe Biden win by a fairly solid majority. At last check, the polling aggregator at RealClearPolitics puts Biden ahead nationally 51 percent to 44.3 percent and in top battleground states 48.9 percent to 46 percent, which would give Biden a 335 to 203 electoral victory. The latest betting odds show Biden favored 64.3 percent to 34.8 percent.

The polls are predicting Donald Trump will lose in November — again. Is it worth paying them attention? Pollsters have adjusted their models to try to avoid the mistakes of 2016, but the COVID-19 pandemic leaves little room for certainty. The problem in 2016 was an overall lack of polling in battleground states — especially polls with more rigid, proven methods. Courtney Kennedy, director of survey research at Pew Research Center, told The Spectator she’s noticed a significant increase in battleground state polling from reputable organizations. ‘This doesn’t mean that the state polling in 2020 is infallible or that the small leads in some states are sure sign of victory,’ she said.

I was wrong, and I apologize. For far too long, pundits have pronounced confidently on matters of national import, pocketed the fee and moved on to the next mercenary opportunity for reckless prognostication and bare-faced self-promotion without so much as a backward glance to see if their opinions were based in fact and their predictions confirmed by events.On August 26, I foolishly suggested in these pages that by early September, polls would show ‘Biden’s lead over Trump shrinking into the margin of error, and Trump edging ahead in a couple of swing states where he is now behind’. This, I now realize, was wrong.

In 2016, I was one of the very few people who publicly stated the night before the election that, despite the polling data, Trump was going to win 280 to 258. I made that prediction because what I was seeing and hearing across Ohio didn’t match what the polling said would happen. I put out a detailed electoral map showing which states he’d win. I got every state right except Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, which I called for Clinton, I thought New Hampshire would go for Trump. I let history overinfluence my call on Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, as no Republican had won Wisconsin since 1984 and Pennsylvania since 1988. Right now, my gut is telling me something just isn’t right again between the polling and the facts on the ground.

I’m not an election prognosticator. I have no magic insight telling me what will happen on November 3, 2020. Frankly, I have zero idea. But what I do have is a great memory and some polling data that suggests Joe Biden’s media-assisted campaign is headed for an eerily similar crash landing to the one that happened in 2016. The media has once again sealed itself in a suffocating bubble, within which the impossible Trump victory can’t happen. The Democrats find themselves strapped to a low-energy candidate who is a bystander as social upheaval scorches battleground states. It has the look and feel of fall 2016. Democrats, start panicking now. First, Joe Biden’s poll numbers are starting to tighten.

More than half of registered voters support President Trump using executive action to bypass Congress and extend coronavirus relief measures, according to a new poll. Trump opted to sign a series of executive orders this past Saturday rather than wait for Congress to reach an agreement on legislation as a prior relief package was set to expire. Democrats and the White House met repeatedly over the past couple of weeks, but despite making 'progress' both sides said they were still too far away to be even close to making a deal. A new poll conducted by Redfield & Wilton Strategies and provided exclusively to The Spectator found that 51 percent of voters agreed that it was right for Trump to take executive action under these circumstances, while just 24 percent disagreed.

A consensus has formed about this presidential election: it is Joe Biden’s to lose. As long as his vice-presidential nomination doesn’t backfire, or he does not spectacularly bungle the debates, the soon-to-be-confirmed Democratic nominee will be in the White House by the end of January. Just look at the polls.Well, do look at the polls, and you’ll notice that Biden is losing ground. He’s still ahead, and comfortably, but the race narrowed in July, just as the media started to discuss a Biden presidency as if it were a fait accompli. Trump’s job approval rating is rising slightly, too, from 41 percent on June 29 to almost 44 percent today, according to the RealClearPolitics tracker.

Throughout the summer, various polls from the key battleground states indicate Joe Biden is in a very strong position. He is up two in Arizona, eight in North Carolina, 11 in Pennsylvania, 10 in Michigan, nine in Florida, nine in Wisconsin, and eight in Ohio. With those numbers, Donald Trump’s reelection is certainly doomed. The only problem is that those polling numbers are from a year ago, when many pundits thought Trump’s reelection was more likely than not. A year later and after Trump has been pummeled nonstop for his coronavirus response and the racial unrest, the polling data from those same states has gotten worse — for Biden.

America is complicated. It’s hard to predict what it’ll do next, despite all the time and money spent observing it. Not without reason is Walt Whitman — with his long beard, loose morals and love of ambiguity — its national poet. In an election year, plumbing the country’s mood is especially crucial. But that doesn’t make it any easier. Once bitten in 2016, the liberal portion of America’s establishment is twice shy, and terrified about slipping into the same complacency over Biden’s chances as it did over Clinton’s. While not an American institution, the Economist fits neatly into the same footloose, cosmopolitan club as the more neoliberal-minded of Democrats.

Joe Biden owes his nomination to black Democrats, who never joined the revolution led by Sen. Bernie Sanders, closed ranks around the former vice president, and overpowered the rest of the Democratic coalition to rescue his candidacy. But Biden is struggling with black men and younger black voters and Democrats know the votes of black Americans will become more difficult with each future election. Many black Americans feel taken for granted by the party and have become increasingly disillusioned with politics and politicians in general.

It’s a difficult time to be a pollster. For roughly 40 years, phone surveys have been the go-to polling method. Now, the internet is marking its territory.Just six percent of Americans answered phone surveys in 2018, continuing a steady decline in the new millennium that experts attribute to increasing instances of spam calls. Pew Research found little correlation between polling response rates and accuracy, but there are lingering concerns over the cost of these studies.‘For phone surveys the trend line up in cost and trend line down in participation are problematic,’ Courtney Kennedy, director of survey research at Pew, told me. ‘In five to ten years, if not sooner, those trends may not be sustainable.

Until recently, it seemed unlikely that Donald Trump would need to call on the services of his former strategist Steve Bannon ever again. Why would he need a fire-spewing insurgent like Bannon, given that he was governing from a position of strength? The economy was at Mach 8; unemployment was at record lows; Kanye West was a personal friend. Above all, this presidency was good television. Viewers would want to find out what happened next. Now refrigerated corpse trucks rumble through the streets of New York City. The number of unemployed threatens to raise John Steinbeck from his tomb to write realistic novels about down-and-out gig workers. ‘We are living in a failed state,’ lamented an uber-viral George Packer article a few weeks ago.

Public opinion is rapidly turning against China as intelligence agencies have exposed the full extent of the communist state’s coverup of the novel coronavirus outbreak. US intelligence has determined that China has underreported total cases and deaths, and dragged its feet in telling the rest of the world about the seriousness of the virus. A Trump administration official told The Spectator earlier this month that the US response was delayed by at least a month due to China’s lack of transparency. Americans are angry at China’s deception: a majority of them polled at the end of March and in early April said they agree with President Trump referring to COVID-19 as the ‘Chinese virus’.

This article is in The Spectator’s January 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. Galileo famously said that the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics. But what made him so important in the history of science was his further insight that mathematics, in order to reveal the laws of nature, had to be empirically tested. Mathematical formulae described what he thought would happen; he had to clamber up the leaning tower of Pisa and drop the two balls to convince us that objects of different masses fall at the same speed. I am not sure that most modern pollsters have taken Galileo’s second insight fully on board. The modern pollster tends to be in love with his model.