In our article two weeks ago, we noted that, despite common perception, the 2016 polls were surprisingly accurate—in both the national polls, as well as State polls. They underestimated Trump in seven polls and underestimated Hillary in five. Even in those, they were within the stated margin of error. Only two states were outside the normal range—and only one of them significantly went to Trump instead of Hillary. That was Wisconsin.
Even so, there’s the perception that polls were wrong in 2016, and there’s suspicion that they will be proven wrong again this year. All the swing states are in the Biden column this year, and Biden has been consistently ahead in the national polls by no less than four percent. In 2016, the polls varied wildly, with Trump even taking the lead in the average of polls a couple of times.
In fact, Republican pollster Frank Luntz said on Fox that Biden has been shown so far ahead for so long that if Trump were to win, “my profession is done!”
However, there are a few pollsters who are bucking the trend, and say that Trump will win this year. We earlier mentioned Insider Monkey, but there are more.
Robert Cahaly, Chief pollster at The Trafalgar Group, spoke with Fox News, and told Guy Benson that all the other polls are wrong.
Cahaly said, “Well, we’re kind of a polling industry disrupter in that we think that the way the industry is being run is very out of date and not in line with modern times, modern values and kind of modern politics to start with the day and age of, you know, mom and dad sitting around the poler [Ed: parlor] waiting for the phone to ring. And this is a political survey. Oh, well, we have to take some time and answer this.
I mean, this is not reality. You know, the phone rings at 6:30 at night. You got. You [Ed: You’re] fixing dinner, you’re washing dishes, putting kids to bed. Nobody’s got time to stop what they’re doing and take a 25, 30, 40 question poll. You’re not getting regular people. You’re getting people who are on the ideological extreme of being way too liberal, way too conservative, or worse yet, people who are bored. We’re about polling average people.”
The Hill says Cahaly sees a close race, but a Trump win, because of what has been called the, “shy Trump voter.”
“I see the president winning with a minimum high 270s and possibly going up significantly higher based on just how big this undercurrent is,” Cahaly said, referring to Electoral College votes. A candidate needs 270 electoral votes to win the White House.
“What we’ve noticed is that these polls are predominantly missing the hidden Trump vote. There is a clear feeling among conservatives and people that are for the president that they’re not interested in sharing their opinions readily,” he added. “These people are more hesitant to participate in polls. So if you’re not compensating for this, you’re not going to get honest answers.”
It should be noted that people don’t elect the president, Electors do, so only state polls matter.
In the previous presidential election cycle, a total of 62 surveys were conducted in the state of Pennsylvania, and only three found a lead for President Trump, including the Trafalgar pre-election survey. In Michigan, 45 polls were publicly released, and Trump led in just two, one of which was Trafalgar’s final 2016 study. In Wisconsin, 33 polls were taken, and none found President Trump running ahead. Yet, in all three cases, he won the state.
In the North Carolina race, Trafalgar missed on the high side, predicting a five-point win for President Trump. It was their poll, however, that brought the cumulative polling average closer to the even mark. In Florida, they also missed on the high side, coming in with a four-point projection for President Trump but correctly predicted his victory.
The National Review wanted to find out why Trafalgar is different. One is the “shy Trump voter” effect.
Much of Trafalgar’s approach focuses on accounting for the so-called social-desirability bias. As Cahaly puts it, that’s when a respondent gives you “an answer that is designed to make the person asking the question be less judgmental of the person who answers it.” Cahaly notes that this phenomenon showed up as long ago as the 1980s, in the so-called Bradley effect, when the African-American mayor of Los Angeles, Tom Bradley, underperformed his polling in a gubernatorial race. It has been a hallmark of the Trump era and is one reason other pollsters missed the impending victory of Ron DeSantis over Andrew Gillum in the 2018 Florida gubernatorial race.
Another is the number of questions.
One is the number of questions on its surveys. “I don’t believe in long questionnaires,” Cahaly says. “I think when you’re calling up Mom or Dad on a school night, and they’re trying to get the kids dinner and get them to bed, and that phone rings at seven o’clock — and they’re supposed to stop what they’re doing and take a 25- to 30-question poll? No way.”
Why does that matter? “You end up disproportionately representing the people who will like to talk about politics, which is going to skew toward the very, very conservative and the very, very liberal and the very, very bored, “Cahaly explains. “And the kind of people that win elections are the people in the middle. So I think they miss people in the middle when they do things that way.”
According to Cahaly, most polls are more than 25 questions. He keeps it between seven and nine, so respondents can answer in a matter of minutes.
Also, how people are contacted.
So Trafalgar mixes up how it contacts people, and especially wants respondents to feel safe in responding. “We use collection methods of live calls, auto calls, texts, emails, and a couple that we call our proprietary digital technology that we don’t explain, but it’s also digital,” Cahaly says. The point, he continues, is to “really push the anonymous part — this is your anonymous say-so.”
Trafalgar tries to avoid so-called weighting to get the partisan mix of respondents right. A traditional pollster might want to get, say, 35 percent Republicans to have a balanced survey, but he comes up short because Republicans are less likely to respond. If only, say, 22 percent of Republicans answer, they are given additional weight to make up for the shortfall. . .
“The better you do at getting an even sample,” according to Cahaly, “the less weighting you have to do.”
So, how exactly will Trump win?
The likeliest Trump electoral path to victory involves winning the battlegrounds of North Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Arizona, and either Michigan or Pennsylvania among the former Blue Wall states (assuming he doesn’t lose states such as Iowa or Ohio).
This is Cahaly’s breakdown: He believes Trump will win North Carolina and Florida and discounts Biden’s chances in Georgia because the Republican-base vote is too big there (the same is true in Texas). . .
Overall, Cahaly sees another Trump win. “If it all happened right now,” he maintains, “my best guess would be an Electoral College victory in the high to 270s, low 280s.”
That would be a very close win. The Electoral College tends to exaggerate a win. In 2016, for example, Trump lost the popular vote by three million votes, but still grabbed 307 Electoral College votes. It has been very uncommon in history for a president to win less than a 60-EC vote difference.
Since this article has run long, we’ve broken it in two. Please move on to the next installment.
Story continued in Part 2 . . .
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