Despite the Polls, Trump Could Win in 2020 (Part 2)

This is part two of our article (read Part 1 here) that says Trump could win despite the polls. In our article, last week, we provided a long list of how Trump could win. There’s more. Pollsters think they have fixed the problems that came up in 2016. The largest flaw was in missing a major variable. They accounted for male-female differences, urban-rural differences, racial differences, and others, but they missed one.

The professional organization of pollsters says weaknesses in the 2016 polling have been fixed. The primary error was in not verifying an adequate mix of education levels.

A 2017 report by the American Association for Public Opinion Research includes a detailed analysis of what went wrong. One of its authors, Charles Franklin, a professor at Marquette University, says while national polling was accurate, there were errors in state-level polls, particularly in crucial swing states, including Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. . .
Franklin posits that the accuracy of these polls was compromised because the methodology did not account for voters’ education levels. Poll respondents tend to be college graduates and studies now show that a large percentage of people with high school diplomas voted for Trump in 2016. Polls at the time failed to capture that support, and instead indicated large leads for Clinton. But Franklin says pollsters have learned from their mistakes and have adjusted their methods to improve accuracy ahead of the 2020 election. . .

Undecided voters also threw off the final results, but the NEP says we have very few undecided voters this year. Also, the support was very shallow last year, which is why the polls were all over the place. We had two unliked candidates, with unknown platforms.

According to a 2016 National Election Pool survey, up to 13% of voters were undecided until right before election day. That represents an 8-point increase compared to the previous election in 2012. Exit poll analysis found that many people from this group in swing states like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin ended up voting for Trump.
But Courtney Kennedy, director of survey research at the Pew Research Center, says that’s unlikely to happen again this year.

“There is a big difference between 2016 and 2020, which is that we now have an incumbent on the ballot in Donald Trump whereas in 2016, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton were both well-known, but no one knew exactly what they would be like as a president,” she says. “I think it is reasonable to think that undecided voters will be unlikely to be as big of a factor as they were in 2016.”

Another issue is the fact that most people don’t understand probability. If analysts say polls show that a candidate will likely win, people hear that as, “will win.” That’s simply not the case. Cahaly acknowledges that.

On the eve of the 2016 election, [538’s Nate] Silver’s final forecast gave Clinton a 71% chance of winning. Cahaly thinks that was incorrect, but even if Silver was absolutely right that still gave the president a decent chance.

“People just dismiss that something can happen,” Cahaly said.

A racehorse named Mind That Bird won the Kentucky Derby in 2009 with 50-to-1 odds stacked against him. Sports highlight reels are full of underdogs who made surprising plays to win the big game, and politics is no different. Even the weather on Election Day can affect outcomes. 

ere’s another issue that will make things difficult this year. Up to this year, the media interviewed people after they voted, in what’s known as “exit polls.” But the Hill quotes Fox News as saying we won’t have that luxury this year, since so many people have voted by mail, and won’t be at the polls to be interviewed on the day of the election.

Fox News Decision Desk Director Arnon Mishkin said the large number of mail-in ballots will make exit polling very difficult in this year’s election. . .He said mail-in votes will likely represent 60 percent of the total vote and that votes are not included in exit polling. 

Meanwhile, Forbes talked to Democracy Institute, which says that, contrary to popular belief, this year will not see greater voter turnout than in 2016.

But not all is as it seems, according to Patrick Basham, polling director at the Democracy Institute. The Democracy Institute is a relative newcomer to political polling – but it correctly forecast Brexit and Trump’s historic 2016 upset. Basham’s latest poll has Trump up 46% to 45%, and up four points in the critical battleground states. I asked Basham why his poll looks so different than the others – and why it’s getting so little mainstream media play. . .

PATRICK: Polling is supposed to be incredibly scientific, and the science is more advanced than ever. But polling has always been a synthesis of science and art – and polls are more art than science in 2020. One of the major challenges is figuring out how the electorate will look. . .

PATRICK: Two key ways – turnout and estimating shy Trump voters or secret Trump voters. The Democracy Institute – along with Zogby and Trafalgar Group – those of us who find a very competitive race see turnout very similar to 2016. . .

PATRICK: Very crudely stated, we see three types of shy Trump voters. First is the blue-collar, middle aged white male in the rural Midwest. He is more busy than afraid to tell you. Second is the white suburban female. Third are African-American and Hispanic voters. They are moving toward Trump in significant, maybe even historic numbers.

And, finally, Washington Monthly points out a circumstance everyone seems to be missing—That Trump’s approval is actually higher than it was in 2016

First, the president is actually more popular now than on the day he was elected. Yes, that’s right. His personal favorability rating around election day in 2016 was 37.5%. Now, it is 43.2%. There are, in fact, hundreds of thousands of Americans (if not millions) who have grown fonder of Trump.

As we have noted several times, Trump won the White House in 2016 by getting votes from only thirty-one percent (31%)—less than a third—of registered voters, so 43.2% is almost one-and-a-half times as much as he might need.

And, finally, Nate Silver, of FiveThirtyEight, points out that if you play Russian Roulette, you have an overwhelming likelihood of being safe, but there’s still a slight chance that calamity could strike. Those are about the odds of a Trump win, but as we saw in 2016, it could happen.