by Ray Keating
The Keating Files – October 24, 2020
Politics is prone to people fooling themselves. Poll watching can become part of this self-deception when it degrades into highlighting polls that favor your candidate, and tossing aside polls that favor the other guy or gal. Fooling oneself also becomes evident when history is twisted to fit a preferred political narrative.
This phenomenon infects many Trump supporters this year in three particular ways.
First, highlighting some polls and ignoring others is a choice that seems to be running rampant among Trump supporters. Why? With Election Day only ten days away, the national polls have President Donald Trump trailing former Vice President Joe Biden by significant numbers.
As a race comes down to the end, if one is looking at polling in a serious way, then the key is to watch averages of recent polls, rather than grabbing that one poll that reflects what you want to happen.
Looking at averages, Biden leads Trump right now by 8-9 percentage points. That’s a daunting deficit for the president, especially at this late point in the race.
The second mistake when watching political polls has to do with misinterpreting history. Many Trump supporters, for example, have latched onto the idea that the polls in 2016 were dead wrong, so they will be this year, too. In reality, the national polls in 2016 were correct, as Hillary Clinton won the popular vote over Donald Trump by 48.0 percent to 45.9 percent. Factor in the margins of error present in all polling, and the national polls were pretty much spot on.
The problem in 2016 came with state polls in three states, and those states broke unexpectedly and very narrowly for Trump, gaining him the White House, i.e., Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Taking note of these states this year, the task for the president remains formidable. Biden holds solid leads, again, looking at poll averages, in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Misinterpreting history also is the third problem this year. There’s a great deal of talk about how Ronald Reagan was trailing Jimmy Carter in 1980, but then the race broke late for Reagan, after the last presidential debate, and he went on to a big win.
Yes, Reagan did win big in 1980 (thankfully!). However, when you look at the polls in total, Reagan really hadn’t been trailing Carter since May of that year. Yes, the race tightened and widened over those subsequent five-plus months, and a poll here and there put Carter up, but Reagan never fell behind when looking at the polls in full.
Consider the following chart presented in a 2012 analysis. Eight years ago, Romney folks also were grasping at the idea of a late comeback by Reagan.
As the author, John Sides, noted: “ The plot shows … the ebbing of Carter’s poll standing throughout 1980. Indeed, Reagan didn’t need his convention bump — which he certainly got — to put him in the lead. The Democratic convention helped erode Reagan’s lead but it never closed it altogether.”
So, where does the Reagan story come from? Gallup, actually. Their polling before the last Carter-Reagan debate (held on October 28) put Carter up by 8 points, but that was among registered voters. The same poll had Carter up by only 3 points (within the margin of error) among likely voters, which is the more substantive polling measure. And again, this was one poll, ignoring the full polling picture at the time.
Can the polls be wrong? Of course. But it’s the exception. In the end, it’s about who comes out to vote. And that’s part of what pollsters try to figure out. But outside of an agenda-driven survey here and there, polling data is not the arbitrary, manipulative tool that it often gets labeled as – especially by those who happen to be trailing in the polls.
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Recent and Related Columns by Ray Keating…
“Stop Looking at the Unemployment Rate: The New York Example”
“Is Trump Turning Texas Purple?”
“A Flood of Bad Economics on Tech and Immigration”
“Polls Before the Dreaded Presidential Debates”
“Voting Your Conscience Isn’t Wasting Your Vote”
“Character-Rich Sci-Fi: Take the Netflix Journey with ‘Away’”
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Ray Keating is a columnist, novelist, economist, podcaster and entrepreneur. You can order his new book Behind Enemy Lines: Conservative Communiques from Left-Wing New York from Amazon or signed books at RayKeatingOnline.com. His other recent nonfiction book is Free Trade Rocks! 10 Points on International Trade Everyone Should Know. The views expressed here are his own – after all, no one else should be held responsible for this stuff, right?
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