According to current news reports, Trump and Biden are literally neck and neck, in surveys typically framed as “If the election were held today…”. This is in spite of Trump’s mounting legal perils and lengthy record of fraud and sexual assaults among other things.
How is this possible? Have several million people changed their minds and come to the conclusion that what we really need now is to give a second term to a would-be autocrat who would move the country further to the extreme right?
Or, is it rather the case that the polls are constructed to factor in the effectsof the Electoral College, and to give more weight to the states whose individual voters carry more weight?
This is covered unto death in the various other threads on trump. Bottom line, 1/3rd of America are trump true believers and will follow their fuhrer all the way to the flaming bunker in berlin.
The rest of normal politics only exists in the other 2/3rd of the American electorate. And even that is a long way away from what the word “normal” meant in even 2010, much less in 1980.
Maybe more like 1/3 of Republicans, but still. And most of the rest of the GOP will vote for any candidate with (R), no matter how disgusting, as at least that means no liberals on the Courts.
The thing is- Progressives and Independents are wishing for a younger, less white, and maybe female Prez candidate. (But Harris is not their fave).
In other words, about 1/3 or so of Americans are wishing for a fantasy candidate that doesnt exist.
And of course, anything that went wrong since Biden was swore in will be blamed on him.
Come election day, most of those last two things will go away, once people know it is either Herr trump of Good old Joe. The 1/3 true loyal MAGAs would like write his name in even if he lost the primary.
What LSLGuy said (and I don’t often agree with him).
But as for the answer to your question above — no.
The only difference with early polls and late ones is that the early polls are usually of registered voters, while closer to the election they try, based on responses to additional questions, to just include likely voters.
It’s simply because Americans are living in two different realities. The first group is living in a bubble that is damn near impenetrable by the second. They hear things like this every day from Fox News:
In the second group’s reality, Trump’s lawyer is on TV every day and Trump himself is having rallies around the country, free to lie to his heart’s content. Yet, the first group still believes that Trump is being silenced. It’s like that for every issue, one side has facts, the other side has lies, and it’s a battle between the two realities for control of the country.
Don’t worry. Remember that Hillary Clinton was consistantly polling so far ahead of him that it was laughable that there was even a contest. The media reminded us everyday, right up and including the day of the election, that she had already won, the election was just a formality.
I’ve never understood the notion that the President is the best we have to offer. Obviously not. Are jingoistic school textbooks the blame? He (so far) is just the person who for whatever reason convinced others that he was the candidate who could win the election at a certain time and then did. Wholly different standard.
However, Trump did improve in the polls, in both 2016 and 2020, as Election Day drew close. So it now being close is nothing for Democrats to feel good about.
IIRC we were reminded that HRC, with all her liabilities, was more popular, which in terms of raw numbers was correct and borne out by the vote. But presidential elections in this country are not popularity contests.
It’s kind of astounding that these two appear pretty likely to be the major candidates, I’ll grant you that. But I don’t think I’ve heard ANYBODY portray them as the best we have to offer.
Biden is a good President, who returned the USA to sanity. He was the only person able to beat trump. Maybe you would have like Susan Smith (made up name) , but she couldnt have beat trump.
Biden is just about the only candidate who could have beat trump.
And the GOP knows full well trump is a liability and a loser. But remember, 100 IQ is the average, so there are lots of people with IQs lower than that- i.e. the typical trump voter.
Why is it astounding? You have trump, the choice of moron, and Biden, the only man who could beat trump, and who has turned out to be a very good president.
See, this kind of talks- that Biden isnt a good choice- is exactly how we got trump in 2016, and how we might get him again.
As a technical matter, and one that I probably should have made the subject of this thread, are the polling methods currently being used different from the ones that “they” used in 2016? Back then, I assumed that the pollsters were using a “popular vote” methodology, so it made sense that HRC stayed on top pretty much throughout. Trump’s numbers did improve towards the end, but I don’t think he ever outpolled HRC in popular opinion. I think the Electoral College should be abolished, but given how it works I understood how Trump managed to be elected despite losing the popular vote.
If the pollsters today are using the same popular vote methodology, and Trump is even with Biden, then we are truly in trouble.
What doesn’t change is that there are both national and state polls. Some say that individual state polls are more indicative of final results because of the electoral college. I disagree because, if you look at the final pre-election polls and compare to the actual vote, national polling is historically more accurate. However, there is room for legitimate differences of opinion there.
Why wouldn’t national polls reflect national intentions to vote?
The internal polling for pros work differently. They concentrate on individual states, especially the swing states, to find numbers of respondents large enough to narrow the margin of error. No need to spend money on California. It’s going to go blue and give all its electoral votes to Dems.
The polls that are announced to the press are just to publicize the pollsters. They generally use about 1000 registered voters. If a state has 1% of the U.S. population, then approximately 10 people would be polled. Nobody would - or should, in any case - take that seriously. The real money is made by going into a state and polling lots of people. But the pros don’t want their opponents to get that info for free.
Nobody should pay any attention to early polls in the newspapers. No one poll should ever get even a second’s thought. Even the average of multiple polls, as given on fivethirtyfive.com or realclearpolitics.com are meaningful only in an extremely limited sense.
Only late in the campaign, after some state results are given, can the trend of a campaign be teased out of the numbers. But they run with margins of error of several percent. In elections where several states have margins of less than 1%, the totals can swing by giant amounts, as seen from 2016 to 2020. A couple of hundred thousand votes out of two hundred million meant a seventy point swing in the Electoral College. How can polling predict results that are based on turnout of voters who don’t register early or make up their minds at the very end? It’s fairly amazing that polling is as accurate as it is.
ETA: I didn’t see @PhillyGuy’s article before I posted. It’s a good summary of all polling techniques for public opinion, which is a far huger subject. What may be important for this thread is that the “horse race” polls still sample a national audience and the state polls would not be included. That methods of polling change over time is true - note that the percent of changing tactics started rising steeply back in 2010 - but somewhat irrelevant to a horse race national poll.
Suppose a poster says that Trump is likely to be convicted. Since there’s a high federal conviction rate - data. But if they go on to say that Trump being convicted will lose him votes — no data. Just wishful thinking.
We have a lot of weak data — in the form of the averages of dozens of polls so far this year — saying that, considering the electoral college tilt, Trump is slightly ahead. Want to say it’s a waste of time to have threads like this before Labor Day 2024– go ahead. I admit to current data being weak.