Politico is out with an article this morning arguing that Trump has a point about pollsters overestimating support for Biden in many of these polls:
As President Donald Trump tumbles in the polls and falls further behind Joe Biden, his campaign has returned to a familiar refrain: The polls are underestimating Trump’s appeal again.
They have a point.
Pollsters aren’t deliberately skewing their surveys against the president and his party, as Trump’s orbit alleges. The national polls showing Trump trailing Biden by an increasing margin aren’t “phony” or rigged.
But some pollsters, especially the relatively few who conduct surveys in battleground states, are still grappling with the same problems that plagued those polls four years ago. In fact, most pollsters believe that, on balance, state polls are overstating the scale of Biden’s advantage.
That was precisely the problem in 2016: The national polls were largely accurate, to within the margin of error. But there were too few state polls, and many of those that were conducted failed to collect accurate data, especially from white voters without college degrees in key swing states.
And those issues haven’t been fixed.
Pollsters are looking for answers…
Pollsters are looking for answers. One of the major takeaways of the American Association for Public Opinion Research’s post-2016 autopsy was that state polls that didn’t weight, or adjust, their samples to include more white voters who hadn’t graduated college missed a key element of Trump’s coalition. In previous elections, the differences in white voters’ preferences along educational lines were smaller, but began to grow last decade and accelerated with Trump on the ballot in 2016.
“Before 2014, it wasn’t that big of a deal because the reality is non-college white voters and college-educated white voters — the distinction between the two wasn’t as dramatic,” said Democratic pollster Jefrey Pollock. “But starting with 2014, that began to cleave a lot and is now obviously humongous.”
GOP pollster Glen Bolger said he believes a combination of pollsters’ inability to get the right educational mix and to convince potential Trump voters to respond and answer truthfully to phone polls is pointing their surveys in a slight Democratic direction.
“I don’t know how big the effect is. I also don’t know what the ratio is between it being ‘shy Trump’ voters and interviewing too many college graduates and not enough non-college grads,” Bolger said. “But I do think those are factors in some of the polls that show a particularly wide lead for Biden at this point in time. And I do think that things will be closer in the states that the polls indicate right now.”
Politico isn’t saying that Trump is really winning in these polls that suggest he’s losing, but rather that his situation may not be as dire as it looks in some of these polls.
Whatever the case, we still have over five months until the election and a lot can and will change before then. As we get closer to November we’ll also see pollsters switching from populations of registered voters to likely voters, which will hopefully yield a more accurate result. But if these pollsters can’t figure out the Trump appeal dynamic in their populations then we might be looking at another election shocker, just like we saw in 2016.