I know I probably sound like a broken record, but I have to point out again that according to the polls, it looks very good for Donald Trump in November. I don't mean to suggest we should assume he'll win — anything can happen, after all — but things look good in both national and battleground state polling. But what if the polls are wrong?
The polls generally show a close election with Trump ahead. After Joe Biden's State of the Union address, he saw a slight bump that saw the polls get even closer, but he still didn't surpass Trump in the RealClearPolitics average. For sure, the media gushed over any poll that showed the race tightening or suggested that Biden had taken the lead. Those bumps have largely faded away, and Trump is pulling away again in the RCP average at present.
But those polls could be wrong. Current polls, which show Trump with small leads, may actually be underestimating Trump's support.
Think I'm crazy? Hear me out. According to an analysis of 2020 election polling by a special task force started by the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR). "Public opinion polls ahead of the 2020 election were the most inaccurate in a generation."
The task force found that polling during the two weeks before the election overstated support for then-Democratic nominee Joe Biden by 3.9 percentage points, which was the largest polling error since 1980 when support for Democratic nominee Jimmy Carter was overestimated by 6 percentage points. The presidential election between Biden, the eventual winner, and incumbent president Donald Trump was much closer than polling had indicated. A report detailing the task force’s discoveries and conclusions is here.
“This discrepancy is across the board. It’s not a Republican polling problem or a Democratic polling problem,” explained task force chairman Josh Clinton, who is also a senior election analyst for NBC News’ Decision Desk. “We found that, regardless of party and regardless of how they were done, sizable polling errors occurred for presidential races as well as senate and state-level races.”
Related: This Is What a Panicking Joe Biden Looks Like
In addition to the 2020 and the 1980 elections, there was another election where the polls were horribly wrong: 2016. In each of these elections, support for the Democratic candidate was grossly overestimated.
"President Trump's victory in 2016 came as a shock to many Americans. National polls showed his opponent, Hillary Clinton, leading the race up until the election," noted Audrey McNamara of CBS News back in 2020. "Even the Clinton campaign was confident she would win. All data they were looking at seemed to predict her victory."
In both the 2016 and 2020 elections, Trump said the polls were wrong, and he was right. Is there any reason to believe that pollsters have finally figured out how and why they keep underestimating Trump's support?
Given Biden's poor poll numbers, the sheer consistency of polls showing voters trusting Trump more than Biden on the most important issues of the election, and polls showing that Biden is losing support from key Democratic constituencies (blacks, Hispanics, and young people) it makes sense that Trump is in a stronger position today than he ever was in 2020 and 2016 polling. But if history is any guide here, even the polls today showing Trump with an advantage may be underestimating his support.
