Let's flash back to 2012. The economy was terrible, as Barack Obama's policies failed to achieve the recovery he promised. Obama infamously declared in the early weeks of his first term that if he didn't have the economy back on track in three years, "then there's going to be a one-term proposition." Sure enough, the economy wouldn't recover all the jobs lost from the 2008 financial crisis until roughly June 2014. Yet even though Barack Obama's presidency proved to be a failure, he had a nearly consistent lead in the polls throughout the campaign.
This led many conservatives to believe that the polls were biased, oversampling Democrats in order to show Obama in the lead and depress GOP voter turnout. Proponents of this theory had plenty of explanations to justify it, but it clearly wasn't happening. In fact, the final RealClearPolitics average had Obama up by a mere 0.7 points—a true toss-up election if there ever was one—and Obama ultimately won by +3.9 points.
Today, there is no shortage of theories about how the polls are once again skewed. Some on the right are saying that the polls show Donald Trump with an insurmountable lead in the GOP primary and ahead of Biden in the general because Democrats want to face Trump in November and are trying to get conservatives to rally behind him only to get crushed in the general election.
It's a rather crazy theory, In order to be true, one has to believe that every polling outlet in the country, regardless of who commissioned or conducted it, is colluding to pull a fast one on the American people at Trump's expense.
Can anyone really say with a straight face that this is happening?
According to conservative radio host Steve Deace, who supports DeSantis, that's exactly what's happening in Iowa right now. I just don't see it.
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That's not to say polls aren't wrong. In fact, they are wrong plenty of times. In 2020, Joe Biden consistently outperformed Donald Trump in the RealClearPolitics average, maintaining a lead that, at times, was in the double digits. Biden's final RCP spread was +7.2 points, but his national popular vote margin was +4.5 points. In the end, the election came down to mere thousands of votes in a small number of battleground states. Hillary's final lead in the 2016 RCP average was +3.2 points, but her actual national popular vote margin was +2.1 points. There's no reason to believe there were intentionally skewed polls, as it appears to reflect a failure of pollsters to understand Trump's supporters and capture them in their polling.
There has never been any conclusive evidence to suggest collusion among pollsters to artificially deflate Trump's support in 2016 or 2020 or inflate it in 2024. That doesn't mean that pollsters haven't attempted to adjust their polling models, and maybe those are doing a better job of capturing Trump's support this time. But it's not just general election matchup polls that point to problems for Joe Biden. There have been multiple polls showing Biden having trouble with young voters, black voters, and Latino voters, which most certainly would be reflected in presidential matchup polling.
Polls are not an exact science, and it's impossible for them to be completely right all the time. That's exactly the reason I like RCP's poll averages. Sure, that's not an exact science either, but different pollsters have different methodologies and sample sizes, and there are certainly outliers that get people in a tizzy as well. But a massive conspiracy by all these pollsters to elevate Trump in order to depress the turnout of his rivals to set him up to lose in November? That just makes no sense.
