In 2020, be more skeptical than ever of polls
by Washington Examiner
| May 26, 2020 12:00 AM
A recent spate of mostly bad polls for President Trump has driven a narrative that he’s on his way out. Pundits have declared his reelection in “deep trouble," and they have highlighted polls showing him “hemorrhaging older voters.†Even Republicans in swing states have raised alarms about how vulnerable Trump is to defeat. But in 2020, as the coronavirus pandemic rips through the world, the uncertainty is so great that it’s sillier than ever to read so much into polls this far out from the election.
To be clear, we aren’t attempting to ignore the polls that clearly show Trump’s risk of defeat. He hasn’t lead Joe Biden in a national poll since February, and he trails his Democratic challenger by 5 points in the RealClearPolitics average. More significantly, recent polls have given Biden an edge in swing states that were key to Trump’s 2016 upset: Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. Biden is even winning in Florida and Arizona, which were supposed to be safer Trump states. Even North Carolina and Georgia are polling as toss-ups.
With all of that being said, it’s important to keep in mind a few things.
First, polls were extremely ineffective in predicting Trump’s victory in 2016. In the last 25 polls of Pennsylvania, Hillary Clinton was ahead in all but one of them. Trump led in only one Michigan poll in all of 2016. He never led in one poll in Wisconsin, a state in which Clinton was up by 6.5 points in the RealClearPolitics average ahead of Election Day. And yet, Trump ended up winning all three states. While there are many theories as to why the state polls in particular significantly understated Trump’s support, the bottom line is that the 2016 results should give pause to anybody drafting Trump’s political obituary.
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