While the majority of the polls suggest that Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden is leading, or at best that it's close, those polls suffer from at least three problems.
First, the tone of the questions. There is significant evidence from behavioral psychology that suggests that the way a question is framed predetermines the range of potential answers. In fact, Gallup has found that respondents can answer very differently to questions with the same topic even in the same survey based on the language that's used. And the use of metaphors can even dwarf the importance of preexisting differences between Republicans and Democrats.
One of the reasons respondents do that is because of a tendency to give socially desirable answers, which was the case especially during the 2016 election. Most people don't like confrontation, so the easiest, albeit not necessarily the best, solution is to avoid it. Right now, saying that you're voting for Trump/Pence is often not the socially desirable answer. In fact, a recent poll by the Cato Institute suggests that nearly two-thirds of Americans say that the political climate is sufficiently harsh that they don't want to give their genuine opinion about politics.
Second, the sample of respondents. Who responds depends on many factors, including the medium (e.g., landline versus cellphone), the location, the sample size and demographic factors. Moreover, the pool of respondents is not necessarily the same as the pool of likely voters. Even though election polls all contain a margin of error, that margin of error is unreliable if the underlying sample does not reflect the population. Researchers have also identified self-screening as the major contributing factor to the polling failures during the 2016 election cycle.
For example, distrust of pollsters also leads to lower response rates for Trump supporters. Rasmussen finds that 17 percent of likely U.S. voters who "strongly approve" of the job Trump is doing say they are less likely to let others know how they intend to vote in the upcoming election. By comparison, only 8 percent of those who "strongly disapprove" of the president's performance say the same.
While proper sampling methodology matters more than the size, having a representative sample with enough people still helps considerably. Robert Cahaly of the Trafalgar Group notes how their work to create minimum samples sizes of 1,000 voters, added to their work to doggedly pursue the "quiet Trump voter," led to Trafalgar being one of the most successful battleground polling firms in the country in 2016. Cahaly explains that "we don't do a state with less than a thousand. You see these polls, 400, 500, 600 people for a state. I don't buy that. Your margin of error is far too high."
Third, the content of the current news cycle. What's going on in a particular moment in time can influence voter attitudes, particularly in swing states. For example, the recent revelation of Hunter Biden's hidden emails on his laptop, coupled with the link to his father, has come at an opportune time for the president. Moreover, if the economic recovery continues, the good news may continue putting wind in Trump's sails.
Admittedly, no poll is perfect. That's why RealClearPolitics takes a step forward by "averaging out" these errors across polls. But "averaging out" only works when errors are made in both directions. Here, many polls make errors primarily in one direction, so the average will still reflect some of the biases that exist.
Gallup conducted a recent survey finding that 56 percent of respondents report that they are better off than they were four years ago, which is striking given that we are in the midst of a pandemic with a recovering labor market and deepening political polarization.
We delved a little deeper into the data from Gallup, coupled with voter registration data, for eight swing states. We find that states with a higher proportion of people who report that they are thriving have a lower polling average for Biden and a higher one for Trump. What's even more telling is that there's a big gap between the percentage of people who say they're thriving and the percentage who say they're voting for Biden. For example, that gap is 5.3 percentage points in Pennsylvania.
Moreover, if we look at voter registration in Pennsylvania, we see a similar pattern. There were 803,427 more registered Democrats than Republicans as of May, but that gap has narrowed to 700,853 as of October. In fact, Republicans have netted seven times as many registered Republican voters than Democrats since 2016. Similar trends are taking place in North Carolina and Florida.
We don't pretend to have all the answers, but we do have some of the right questions. How are people actually feeling? Surveys are great when respondents know what they're answering and when the sample is representative, but surveys can be misleading otherwise.
About the Author:
Jonathan Jakubowski is author of the newly-released book, Bellwether Blues: A Conservative Awakening of the Millennial Soul. He is also director of a startup business focused on sustainable packaging and is the executive chairman of the Wood County (Ohio) Republican Party. Follow him on Twitter at @jonjakubowski.
Christos A. Makridis is a research professor with Arizona State University's W.P. Carey School of Business, a senior adviser at Gallup and a nonresident fellow at Baylor University. Follow him at @camakridis.
Reader Comments
When there's a website that has doxxed every Trump donor using an interactive map, there's is no fucking way I'm going to give my political opinion to a stranger that has my first and last name.
(Sorry, can't help it, the ridiculousness is somehow permeating what's left of my brain, or something . . .)
Good people have cause for concern over showing support for Trump. The Dims have publicly threatened them and applauded the violence in their cities.
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I've been holding out scant hope that DT would at least somewhat pull it together but having gone thru as much of as many of the links at the bottom of the page as I could stomach this late in the day I've tentatively concluded I've been on a fool's errand.
IF the settlement stories true and IF those who settled signed ironclad boiler plate wrt remaining silent and IF he paid some $30M for his alleged 30 to 40-odd years of escapades thru many kids' lives it's a) no wonder he went broke 6 times and b) no wonder his 'swamp draining' has been, as the ranchers hereabouts say, all hat and no cattle. And, IF all the 'IFs' above are in fact true, the swamp low-lifes own not only the ranch, they own the no-cattle 'rancher' . . . outright.
Maybe, on the other hand, the guy is a) telling some part of the truth wrt his swamp efforts and b) he actually has a conscience and wants to put some of his alleged crimes as right as he can.
Maybe . . .
Bottom line: we either fix this sh*t ourselves, en masse, or we live out truly sh*tty lives . . . And for once it really is a binary, either/or choice as there is nothing negotiable nor nuanced about The Haters' centuries old, inbred, end-game intents . . .
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No one has yet said one word about any of this
No one had said one word indicates he is towing someone’s line.
The reason I live by myself on forty acres is solely to work on digging out my own injuries and false beliefs, and expectations of others, and wanting everything to be my way, thinking my way is right, is best.
Because all I can change is me and I have to take responsibility for my projections on the planet. I am adding to this mess we have all created, some proactively and others (probably many more) through inactivity, passivity.
He's made some dumb, even disturbing comments in the past, for sure. I think as far as this specific case goes much or all of it is untrue. You are free to believe as you wish.
Looking to Snopes as fact checkers is like looking at a penguin as a spaceship. But that said, and particularly at this late date, it seems to me highly suspect that all this has (re)surfaced. I don't have a life to spend rooting around in Trump's self-caused tribulations and was hoping some one would take up that that dirty dig because if I'm correct Trump is owned outright and therefore effed from the get-go.
At any rate, things are what they are, they'll play out as they play out and beyond possibly helping some few to disabuse themselves of false hopes there's little I can do in respect of this imbroglio.
In my tiny little view, the matter is serious.
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