By Chris Satullo
An exchange happening frequently these days in Trump-weary households across this great land goes something like this…
Spouse A: “Hey, you did you see the latest New York Times/Upshot poll? It has Biden up by 14 points.”
Spouse B: “Don’t talk to me about polls. Polls broke my heart last time.”
Spouse A: “I’m trying to calm you down. The news is good. The Real Clear Politics national polling average has Joe up by 10.”
Spouse B: “Yeah, so was Hillary. And the polls were so wrong. They ripped my heart from my chest and fricasseed it to feed Donald Trump his supper.”
Spouse A: “Look at these state polls. Just look! Biden’s up by big margins in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, the three states that let Hil down last time. The Blue Wall is back, baby!”
Spouse B: “That just means Fox-heads around the Great Lakes are lying to the pollsters, like last time. Come election day, they’ll rise out of the weeds and vote Him back in. (Shudders.) Where’s that brochure about the good life in Saskatoon?”
Spouse A: “I looked at FiveThirtyEight this morning. It says Fox News polls – Fox News! –have Biden basically tied in Texas and Georgia. If those kinda states flip, then Fleetwood Mac should start its sound check, because it’s Landslide time.”
Spouse B: “FiveThirtyEight? Isn’t that that uber-nerd’s thing – Nate Whathisname? Isn’t he the one who had Trump getting 29 percent of the vote last time? Why listen to him?”
Spouse A: “Silver. His name is Nate Silver. And – “
Spouse B: “I’m not having this conversation anymore. I’m sick of politics and Him and all of this. Here’s what I want to talk about: What’s for lunch?”
No one should blame Spouse B for feeling bruised after living through the Trumpian Dawn of Nov. 9, 2016. His win felt like a shocker. But in this conversation, Spouse B gets almost everything wrong about polls and the 2016 election – just as millions of anxious Democratic voters do.
Let’s review:
The polls were so wrong …
No. They. Were. Not. Repeat after me: The national polls were not wrong. They got the 2016 national popular vote almost right. The final cluster of national polls had Hillary Clinton up on average by a tick more than 3 percent. She won the popular vote by 2.1 percent.
The perception stems in part from how much of her eventual margin came from West Coast states, where votes weren’t fully tallied until days after the networks had called the election for Trump and the Great Blue Funk had begun.
That said, some state polls – particularly in pivotal Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan – were off significantly. That’s not unusual. State polls tend to be less reliable because they are less frequent, with smaller samples – and sometimes get done by less experienced pollsters.
And – stop me if you’ve heard this before – we don’t actually elect our president by the national popular vote. We do it through something called the Electoral College, which totes up wins state by state (mostly). So, in an election where the winner benefits mightily from the quirks of the College, flaws in polls from swing states loom large.
The state polls didn’t have to miss by a ton to get the electoral votes wrong. Trump eked out wins in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan – worth 46 electoral votes – by a combined total of 80,000 votes. By contrast, Clinton won Philadelphia alone by 457,000 votes – which got her precisely squat in the Electoral College.
She won Los Angeles County alone by 1.7 million, which is roughly equal to Trump’s entire combined vote total in Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Utah, North Dakota and South Dakota, which garnered him 22 electoral votes. What’s more, she could have forsaken all those Tinseltown votes and still won California by a healthy margin.
So, no, the polls were not that far off. The Electoral College is weird and Donald Trump was mad lucky.
Nate Silver said Trump would get 29 percent of the vote.
No. He. Did. Not. Nate Silver on the eve of the election said Trump had a 29 percent chance of winning. Very different thing. And quite accurate.
It helps to understand the difference between a poll and a forecast, and how they express their findings.
A poll is a snapshot in time. It shows who seems to be leading at that moment. Its finding is usually expressed as a margin – the difference in percentage points between one candidate’s level of support and the opponent’s level. The Times national poll that Spouse A cites found 50 percent of its respondents said I’m for Biden, while 36 percent said I’m for Trump. Fifty minus 36 equals 14, so the results are expressed as Biden +14.
An election forecast, by contrast, is an estimate of the probability of a given candidate winning, based on the evidence of the polls at that moment. So on the eve of 2016 election, Nate Silver was saying: A candidate with DJT’s poll numbers right now normally has a 3 in 10 chance of winning – in other words, not hopeless at all. He just needs several things to fall his way.
The Times Upshot column in 2016, for some reason, took to explaining its Trump win probability – less than Silver’s but again not negligible – in terms of the chances that an NFL kicker would miss a field goal from a given distance. The Sunday before the election, a passel of NFL kickers botched kicks of roughly the 37-yard length the Upshot had cited in that morning’s paper. Omen?
Well, Hillary then proceeded to shank her kick and Donald filled his inside straight with cards named Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan.
Trump voters lie to pollsters
As Trump has sagged in the polls recently, GOP leaders have clung to this theory, which was trotted out in 2016 to explain the gap between polls and the actual results. Just you wait, they say, you’ll discover the numbers are way wrong because our voters either dodge polls or lie to them.
Why would people lie? Out of shame, went one theory back then. But now? Shame? Trump’s supporters are so public and fierce in their devotion they’ll risk their lives by gathering indoors without masks in an arena or megachurch. Could it be those 2016 secretive “shame voters” who are now fleeing Trump and flocking to Biden in recent polls?
Another possibility: Some Trump backers, emulating their hero, love to lie to pollsters just to troll the liberals, to make them tear their hair and rend their garments. OK, I’ll buy it. But it’s unimaginable that their number is so great it would push Biden’s 9-14 point leads inside the polls’ margins of error. (Rule of thumb, without launching into a treatise on this thorny topic: Even well-done polls tend to have a margin of error such that any stated lead of less than six points might be illusory.)
And now for our final canard about 2016.
Hillary had the same lead as Biden…
No, she didn’t. Her June 2016 lead over Trump was 4 points, according to the same polling averages that put Biden up 9.6 or 10 today. Her lead did grow larger than 4 at moments, but its overall trend line was more volatile and jagged where Biden’s has been steadily up.
Other important differences:
Even this far from the election, polls are turning up relatively low percentages of undecideds. Last time, undecideds surged toward Trump in the last week, helping decide the outcome. (Gee, thanks, Jim Comey.)
Last time, Hillary Clinton was the candidate with baggage, the one who represented continuity while lugging a high (and intense) level of personal disapproval. Today, Donald Trump is the incumbent, facing accountability for the pandemic, historic unemployment and racial turmoil. His disapproval rating among likely voters is 54.8 percent and hasn’t dipped below 50 percent this year. Trump voters of course disapprove of Joe Biden, but mostly because he’s a Democrat and is seeking to oust their hero. But the polls indicate that most Americans just like Biden at a level that neither Clinton nor Trump has ever attained.
Trump can still win, of course. Dear Lord, even poor ol’ Michael Dukakis sported a 17-point lead in one poll in July 1988. George W. Bush was up 8 at this time in 2000 and ended up losing the popular vote. Trump will have mucho bucks to spend on scorched-earth tactics, bolstered by the foreign interference he eagerly seeks and state GOP officials’ willingness to suppress the Democratic vote by purging voter rolls improperly, shutting down polling places and just general incompetence.
Still, Spouse B should get over her PTSD from 2016. Not to relax or get cocky. Just to realize that the facts driving this election are quite different from 2016. The virus is still in charge and is feasting right now on the folly of red state politicians. Working people’s pain and stress are severe – and about to get much worse if Mitch McConnell and his Senate majority have their way on the next stimulus bill. And the impact of George Floyd’s murder will not fade.
Trump is going to have to kick a 60-yard field goal to win this time.
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Chris Satullo, a civic engagement consultant, is a former editorial page editor/columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a former vice president/news at WHYY public media in Philadelphia.