What's going on in this election right now? We have polls showing Donald Trump ahead nationally by two to three points, and others claiming that Kamala Harris is up as much as six points. Then, of course, in the battleground states, which will decide this election, Trump has a marginal lead. And at the end of the day, experts tend to land on "this election will be close."
That's a fair assessment for sure — the 2020 election hinged on less than 50,000 votes across three states — but is that really what pollsters believe?
Ben Shapiro, for one, thinks that pollsters have no clue and are just playing it safe. During a DailyWire Backstage panel discussion after the vice presidential debate, he argued that current polling showing that the race is within the margin of error raises red flags.
The crux of Shapiro’s argument lies in the methodology behind these polls. Pollsters use what’s known as “likely voter screens” to project who will turn out on Election Day. Shapiro suggested that “when all the polls keep saying the same thing and they all keep saying that every single state is margin of error, I start to think that pollsters are grouping,” meaning that they may be overly cautious in their predictions.
“When you're looking at these polls, what they're doing is they're constructing what they call likely voter screens,” Shapiro continued. “They're trying to figure out what the constituency of the voting population in each state is going to be, and that means they get to play with the numbers,” which can skew results.
Shapiro likened this phenomenon to “p-hacking” in scientific studies, where researchers manipulate data to achieve statistically significant outcomes. He suggested similar tactics might be at play in polling data. For example, as we've covered here at PJ Media many times, polls have shown Trump significantly over-performing with black, Hispanic, union, and young voters — traditionally strong Democrat constituencies — yet the topline results of these polls show Trump only tied or slightly behind Harris overall.
"There's no way he loses Hispanics by 14 points and maybe comes close to winning union members and then loses the election,” he noted.
Why @benshapiro doesn't trust the polls: pic.twitter.com/OYCSTapcUK
— Daily Wire (@realDailyWire) October 2, 2024
If Trump is indeed only trailing by such slim margins among key traditional left-leaning demographic groups — as many polls from different pollsters have been showing for months now — there is legitimate reason to suspect that pollsters may be reluctant to put out poll results that show what they believe is going to happen in the election. It's easy to dismiss these concerns because we kind of go through this every four years with mixed results.
In 2012, the right was convinced that polls showing Barack Obama ahead were wrong, yet he won. In 2016, the polls certainly were wrong, and despite an overwhelming consensus that Hillary Clinton was going to win, Trump emerged victorious. In 2020, it seems the right didn't even bother taking polls showing Joe Biden ahead seriously, and look what happened.
As for 2024, who knows? I've seen the polls showing Trump making huge gains with traditionally Democrat-leaning voters and find it hard to reconcile those numbers with poll results showing Harris ahead or even a tie race. Even if we are to assume that Trump is doing much better than the topline numbers suggest, that's no guarantee he's going to win.
Politico reported earlier this week that "Some battleground state Republicans say they’re worried they see little evidence of Donald Trump’s ground game — and fear it could cost him the election in an exceedingly close race."
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"In interviews, more than a dozen Republican strategists and operatives in presidential battlegrounds voiced serious concerns about what they described as a paltry get-out-the-vote effort by the Trump campaign, an untested strategy of leaning on outside groups to help do field work and a top-of-the-ticket strategy that’s disjointed from the one Republicans down the ballot are running," the report continued. "After years of attempts to mimic Democrats’ Barack Obama-era grassroots organizing model, the GOP is still trying to develop a ground game strategy that can rival their opponents’. And as Harris continues to pour money into her door-to-door efforts, some of the strategists and operatives fear the party’s efforts this year will fall short — potentially hampering Trump in key battlegrounds."
In fairness, we heard the same narrative that Trump had a ground game problem back in 2016 as well.
“As the presidential election marathon breaks into a final sprint, the Trump campaign faces a jaw-dropping gap in the ground game: Hillary Clinton currently has more than three times the number of campaign offices in critical states than does Donald Trump,” wrote PBS in late August 2016. “Those figures include both Trump offices and Republican National Committee victory offices, as confirmed by the Trump campaign.”
We all know how that worked out. But after Clinton's unexpected loss in 2016, Democrats aren't taking anything for granted, and neither should Republicans. Trump may actually be overperforming with various groups and be doing better in the polls than we're being led to believe, but that all means nothing if the GOP doesn't have a solid ground game.
