If conservatives are skeptical of the accuracy of this year’s way early general election polls, we have a right to be.
It’s safe to say longtime news watchers and numbers crunchers are conditioned to the establishment media underreporting the depth of feeling that Donald J. Trump engenders, passing off his backers’ passion as emotionally spurred and/or disregarding the ballyhoo as the product of racism or sexism or xenophobia or obsession with guns and religion or hating immigrants or gay people. Conservatives and Republicans are never given allowance for establishing their views based on experience or logic.
Pollsters earn their keep by compiling data and plugging it into formulas which supposedly present a snapshot or a moment in time – how voters would behave if the election were held today. It’s almost always been the case that early national surveys favored Democrats only to have day-of results go the other way. Or at least that’s been the case since Trump arrived on the scene.
But are the data compilers getting it all wrong again? In an article titled “Are Trump’s Polls Understating His Lead?”, the always terrific for an astute observation David Catron wrote at The American Spectator:
“…But the averages that really matter are those which show him ahead in all seven of the battleground states where the election will be decided. It’s a good bet that they are, once again, underestimating the number of votes that will be cast for Trump. Lest you have forgotten amidst the economic and cultural chaos that has attended the return of ‘the adults’ to power, the 2020 polls undercounted Trump voters by wider margins than in 2016. At length, the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) commissioned a task force to assess how badly the polls performed…
“So, unless the pollsters have solved the problems that plagued them in the last two presidential elections, it’s probable that Trump’s actual support among voters is stronger than his polling suggests. This is particularly important in 2024 because Trump, for the first time ever, has maintained a consistent lead in most national and swing state polls since last fall. This was never true in 2016 or 2020. It’s obviously difficult to say precisely how far off the polls are this time, but if they are understating Trump’s support as much as they did four years ago, he will win most of the crucial battleground states and the general election. Is this a real possibility?”
I think Catron answers his own question. But with Trump tied up in courtrooms and limited, in some sense, to commenting on the witch hunt nature of the legal proceedings against him, some conservatives are worried that too much time away from the campaign trail will have a deleterious effect on his public standing.
As Catron indicated, it appears to be having the opposite effect. Trump’s poll figures are strong, but are they still being understated due to establishment media hatred of Trump?
Whereas in 2016 the polling industry fell victim to the general stated belief that Trump couldn’t win, the survey-takers and formula concocters consistently underestimated the “shy Trump” vote, meaning that segment of the American populace who’d become so discouraged by the workings of the Democrats under the Obama administration that they’d opted to abandon their lifelong devotion to the liberal party and try something new – such as following a bombastic outsider who’d gained more notoriety and fame (infamy?) in his life for his tabloid reputation than he ever had for being a political prophet.
I recall regularly listening to the Michael Savage show at the time (note: Savage was on in the afternoon when I was picking up my kids from school, so I endured him for as long as it took to get through car-line to the front door), and the harsh populist/conservative commentator sang the praises of Trump when no one else would.
Incidentally, Savage fell out of favor with me when he kept claiming credit for bringing on the Trump revolution while also disparaging the contributions of widely listened-to conservative media personalities such as Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, as though it wasn’t a combined effort from all conservatives to talk-up the attributes of the MAGA proponent.
But it was clear that Trump struck a chord with the “forgotten Americans” with his get-tough rhetoric on illegal immigration, aversion to non-well-thought through military adventurism, advocacy for trade protectionism, insistence on replacing recently passed Justice Antonin Scalia with a new justice who would honor the original meaning of the Constitution in addition to his fierce combative attitude and desire to drain the DC swamp that had caused so many so much pain.
Nevertheless, because Trump elicited such a negative visceral response from the establishments of both parties, he became an outcast – and a hated one at that. The Never Trump movement sprang to life and folks were targeted for expressing approval of Trump, even within Republican circles. No wonder there were so many “shy Trump voters” who didn’t register in pre-2016 polls.
Being targeted by the deep state, even back then, was a very real thing. Democrats recognized that Hillary Clinton was the latest in a new type of Democrat – every bit as ruthless and self-possessed at Big Bubba Bill Clinton, and just as big of a liar as he was – but far, far more willing to do the bidding of the left at the exclusion of regular citizens.
Crooked Hillary’s “basket of deplorables” speech was all about the hardcore MAGA voters, which, according to her, made up about 25 percent of the American population. With such opposition, would Trump’s most earnest backers really want to give themselves and their views away to pollsters who called them out of the blue seeking to record who they intended to vote for?
To suggest that the polls were wrong on Election Night 2016 was an understatement. I’d suspected that Trump would do better than the pundits gave him credit for, but I had no idea that he’d win rather easily in Florida, North Carolina and Ohio – and still pull through in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, shattering the left’s “blue wall” in the process.
The media spent months trying to explain how they’d failed to spot the “upset” from Trump’s voters, basically downplaying the “shy voter” phenomenon and claiming they’d under sampled his supporters, etc. Pollsters made excuse after excuse for getting it wrong, vowing to do better in future elections – but they still couldn’t account for the Trump phenomenon. It’s one of the main reasons why now, because Trump “only” leads historically unpopular senile Joe Biden by a smidge, that people don’t buy it.
It’s also the explanation for why so many conservatives still think the 2020 election was stolen. For those who remember – and who wouldn’t – Trump took leads in most if not all the “swing” states late into Election Night, only to see those margins slowly dwindle as blue jurisdictions uncovered gobs of mail-in votes which all appeared to go to senile Joe Biden. Wouldn’t this make the average person curious how it happened everywhere, including Trump favoring places like Georgia and Arizona?
Had these states suddenly turned liberal? Had the media really convinced COVID stay-at-home voters that senile Joe Biden was a better choice? It didn’t make sense. And the number of ballots collected had dramatically increased over previous elections, like senile Joe was a better alternative who inspired people or something.
It simply can’t be. While one can understand how some Americans were frustrated with Trump (hence, Nikki Haley’s respectable showing in the 2024 GOP primaries), it didn’t compute that millions would’ve seen senile Joe Biden as the solution to anyone’s political problems. Even in 2020, when much of the country remained locked down and buried under stupid mask mandates, Trump was out campaigning like there was no tomorrow, speaking to Americans who respected and admired the number of accomplishments he’d managed in his four short years.
Yet the 2020 polls showed something completely different.
As stated here before, Trump didn’t do his cause any favors by retaining certain government COVID dictators (rather than firing them outright, or at the very least, limiting their microphones to spread “disinformation” about China’s role, etc.) and offering a very poor first debate performance.
Getting COVID himself instilled a sinking feeling in many of us back then. Yet still the Election Day tallies seemed to point to another Trump victory. Until they didn’t.
Another reason why Trump’s poll numbers could be underestimating his true support now is the lack of foundation for senile Joe Biden’s campaign claims. Biden and his underlings have been pounding the abortion issue at practically every stop, but the independent voters who will decide the election are more worried about kitchen table matters and illegal immigration than they are about “women’s reproductive rights” or tiresome platitudes from Democrats complaining about racism and governmental discrimination towards suspect groups.
Hasn’t Biden already beaten these topics to death? Trump, on the other hand, can point to the heinous open border, the worthless senile Joe foreign policy, the Democrats’ absence of law enforcement (except to go after J6 protesters and Christian abortion clinic picketers), the no-end-in-sight Ukraine war, China’s threat to Taiwan, the administration’s botched exit from Afghanistan and the cultural deterioration forced on us through Biden’s regulatory scheme, such as the recent weakening of Title IX protections for women.
Surveys similarly show that Trump is capturing a larger share of young voters, African-Americans and Hispanics and has also made further inroads into union members than he did in 2020. If this is truly the scenario, why is Trump only maintaining such small leads in polls?
With the summer campaign season practically on our doorsteps, polls will likely go up and down based on news events, the party conventions and give-and-take between the candidates themselves. Senile Joe Biden isn’t going to get any younger or more competent, and Donald Trump won’t get a break from the establishment media. Take the poll results with a grain of salt.