Actually, polling data provides valuable insight into the feelings, attitudes, and leanings of voters. Too often, however, political candidates, pundits and strategists ignore the “devil in the details” in cross tab polling data and go their own way, then blame the polls when things go wrong.
The common meme in 2020 is that polling can’t be trusted because 2016 polls were so wrong. Corollaries to that meme are that polls were wrong in 2016 and are wrong in 2020 because Trump people lie to pollsters about supporting Trump, and Trump voters simply won’t talk to pollsters. But these oft-repeated arguments ignore the fact that the national and state polls in 2018 accurately reflected the building blue wave for Democrats winning control of the House. Further, 2016 polls missed Hillary Clinton’s national popular-vote margin by only about one percentage point.
Clinton’s national popular-vote edge was 2.1 percentage points (equal to about 2.9 million votes) and Hillary won the national popular ballot contest by 2.86 million votes. There couldn’t have been too many Trump voters who lied or wouldn’t respond to pollsters in 2016 for them to be that close.
In 2016, 45 states and the District of Columbia exactly followed polling in those states. Florida and North Carolina were considered toss-ups, along with Maine's and Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional Districts. The top line polling numbers in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, where Clinton lost by 77K votes, showed Clinton ahead in each, because pollsters did not properly weight the sample of voters without a college degree when calculating their top line “horse race” numbers. Trump's advantage in those key battleground states wasn't noticed by mainstream media pundits who only look at those top line numbers until late in the race, if at all. (Polling companies now correctly weight the sample of voters without a college degree when calculating the top line “who is winning” headline numbers.)
What if the 2020 presidential electoral map looked like this on November 4th. The trend and growing magnitude of negative polling results for Donald Trump this week and over the last few weeks show Trump is increasingly an underdog to reach the 270 electoral votes he needs to win a second term in the fall. A series of polls in swing and heretofore red states released Wednesday and over the past month make this reality clear.
* A Fox News poll in Arizona shows Joe Biden leading Trump 46% to 42%
* A Fox News poll in Ohio put Biden at 45% to Trump's 43%
* A Fox News poll in Wisconsin had Biden at 49% and Trump at 40%.
* A Quinnipiac University poll in Texas had the race at Trump 44%, Biden 43%.
* The latest Fox News and Quinnipiac University polls in Pennsylvania had Biden at 50% and Trump at 42%.
* The latest Fox News poll in Michigan had Biden at 49% and Trump at 41%.
* A poll of likely Michigan voters conducted this week by EPIC-MRA for the Detroit Free Press found Joe Biden now leads Trump in Michigan 53% to 41%, doubling his lead over the incumbent since January.
* The latest Fox News poll in Florida had Biden at 46% and Trump at 43%.
* The latest Civiqs poll in Georgia had Biden at 48 percent and Trump at 47 percent.
* The latest NBC News / Marist poll in North Carolina had Biden at 49% and Trump at 45%.
* The latest NBC News / Marist poll in North Carolina had Biden at 49% and Trump at 45%.
The latest CNN Poll of Polls this week shows 51% of registered voters nationwide back former Vice President Joe Biden, while 41% support President Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential race.
The new numbers represent a shift in Biden's favor since April, when the CNN Poll of Polls found support for Biden averaging 48%, while Trump averaged 43% support.
How bad are those numbers for Trump? Trump carried Ohio by 8 points and narrowly won Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan, by a collective 77,000 votes, helping him win 306 electoral votes in 2016. Trump’s path to 270 electoral votes and victory in 2020 without the electoral votes from those four midwestern states is less than narrow.
On Saturday’s edition of MSNBC’s “Weekends,” Democratic strategist Ed Kilgore suggested that President Donald Trump could ultimately meet the same political fate as Herbert Hoover — and take down the rest of the Republican Party in the process. Rachel Bitecofer, a professor at Christopher Newport University who accurately predicted the number of Congressional seats Republicans would lose in the 2018 midterm election, agrees. Bitecofer has penned a dire 2020 Congressional election forecast for the Republican Party.
Back in July of 2019, when Rachel Bitecofer, a professor at Christopher Newport University, first released her 2020 presidential forecast, more than 20 candidates had thrown their hats into the ring seeking the Democratic Party's 2020 nomination.
Rachel Bitecofer, Assistant Director of the Wason
Center for Public Policy at Christopher Newport
University, joins David Pakman to discuss her
political modeling and much more...
Consolidating under Biden, Democrats are now well-positioned to make a full-court press for the White House. Although the party will face the risk of defection from the most die-hard Sanders supporters, by nominating Biden, they avoid what would have been much worse party disunity. With Sanders at the top of the ticket "frontline" Democratic incumbents and candidates in competitive races would have been forced to distance themselves from socialism, and thus, their party's presidential nominee. Such a situation would have risked the party's ability to frame 2020 a referendum on Donald Trump (something they may struggle to do anyway) muddling the negative partisanship that is driving mass voting behavior in the Trump Era.
Bitecofer’s late March post primary forecast update has Arizona moving from "toss-up" to "lean Democrat," pushing the anticipated baseline Electoral College count for Biden from the 278 predicted in July to 289 now. To clarify, this means that Biden is at 289 Electoral College votes before considering the outcome of the swing states in my model which are Iowa, Georgia, Florida, North Carolina, Maine CD 2, and Nebraska CD 2.
It should be noted, Bitecofer’s late March update of her top of ballot forecast predates any potential fallout from President Trump’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic and corresponding economic crisis. But the potential impact of these events, given the constraints of polarization and hyperpartisanship that grip our politics, could soften the enthusiasm of some core Republican voters for Trump's re-election beyond the confines of this forecast.
Bitecofer argues that Democrats this cycle are more likely to benefit from “negative partisanship” that is defined by one political faction’s fear and dislike for the political party that holds the White House. In particular, she points to the strong Democratic turnout in this spring’s Wisconsin Supreme Court elections as a harbinger of what’s to come in the fall.
“Whatever 2020 turnout is, barring something extraordinary that disrupts the election, if more Democrats and left-leaning independents vote than did so in 2016 and pure independents break against Trump and congressional Republicans, Democrats will not only hold their 2018 House gains — they are poised to expand on their House majority and are competitive to take control of the Senate,” she writes.
Getting more granular and analyzing districts up for grabs, Bitecofer believes that “Democrats have at least a dozen very attractive prospects in the House to add to their already robust House majority” and that “Democrats are in superior positions in three of the four swing [Senate] races they need to win a 50-vote majority and have six prospects from which to glean their fourth seat.”
After Senator Bernie Sanders dropped out of the Democratic presidential race on Wednesday, he addressed supporters in a live stream from his home in Burlington, Vt. Though he acknowledged he could not win the nomination, he said his movement had won “the ideological battle.” Sanders congratulated former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and pledged to work with him.
Here’s a full transcript of his speech.
Good morning and thank you very much for joining me. I want to express to each of you my deep gratitude for helping to create an unprecedented grass roots political campaign that has had a profound impact in changing our nation.
