Just FYI, “push poll” is the term of art for this.
You know, it’s been awhile since we last heard about how RFK Jr was polling 25% and what a massive spoiler he was gonna be.
Thank you, new terms to be learned! Of course, I think my description is accurate, but also excesive.
Another thing I would ask those rating Biden as president: did you listen to the state of the union address? I think 90% would say no, and the remaining part, 5% saw clips of it. The last 5% not even that.
Those who think polling is broken may feel vindicated by this head scratcher:
The RealClearPolitics Arizona polling average has Gallego over Lake by 8.5 points, while Trump is over Biden by 5.5 points (and more if 3rd parties get ballot access). Makes zero sense if Trump is an older Lake, while Biden is an older Gallego, as I would look at it if an Arizonan voter.
Are any of these the real explanation:
— Broken polling (although I am almost certain that’s not it)
— Arizona swing voters are ill-informed concerning Gallego and will turn on him when they find out he’s as progressive as Biden
— Trump is Teflon coated, Lake is not (surely part of it, but why?)
— Lake’s history of abortion extremism
— Mexican ancestry gives Arizona candidates a boost
— The small Trump-Biden age difference is a really big deal
— Arizonans love to ticket split
— Something else
I also thought that maybe Arizonas prefer male candidates, but that is wrong.
It is a head scratcher. And so are all the other races that Democrats continue to do well in, from the 2022 midterms (an amazing D result when compared to 1994 and 2010) to most recently the special election to replace George Santos.
The only reasonable conclusions seem to be that either the polls are broken or that Biden is the (one of the) least popular Democrat(s).
In a world where phone and internet scams are rampant, everyone knows it’s bad to give out personal information to strangers and phone numbers can be easily spoofed, who is answering these polls? I they will never get me. I guess it’s the same reason why scammers make a lot of money. People are still willing to talk to strangers on the phone and give them information.
Excellent point. I have my phone set to where the only calls that come through are from people on my contacts list. I don’t know how common that is, but if I didn’t have it on I’d be getting way too many scam calls throughout the day.
ETA: Although I can think up stereotypes for groups that are traditionally Democratic (minorities distrustful of authorities) as well as those traditionally Republican (people that are afraid of the “deep state”) for setting their phone that way, I have no idea if doing so actually has a partisan lean.
If the polls are broken, something big happened to break them in the last fifteen months, since they were fine in 2022. This is implausible.
I’ve thought of a few more plausible possibilities.
— Lake is, in Arizona, less popular than Trump. As to why, it doesn’t really matter; she just is. But I suppose it is partly because she is more extreme on issues, the biggest example being her labeling abortion “the ultimate sin.” Another reason: She’s a loser. So is Trump, but she lost more recently.
— Gallego is a Marine veteran. Military membership is generally admired in the U.S.
— Biden has more vulnerabilities character assassins can exploit as compared to Gallego.
— AFAIK there have been few GOP character assassination ads targeting Gallego so far. When these run, his polling advantage will narrow. By contrast, the character assassination themes against Biden are already well-known.
I think “polling is broken” is not quite correct, “It’s too early for polls to be very accurate” would be closer to the truth. Looking at some of the polls that show Trump ahead they have some ridiculous things going on, like being tied with women and winning latinos.
Trump is 59% unpopular in some recent poll.
Biden is (ave) 56% unpopular, because people refuse to hear good news.
It’s going to be tight election.
I suspect that MAGA voters are more eager to be polled than most everyone else. Especially now, this far out from November. Their leader is besieged by “weaponized government”, otherwise known as, consequences for his actions, and they identify with his worlds biggest victim fantasy. There is also a strong “perception is reality” belief on the right, where they think reality is created from the top down, and the more frequently and the more strenuously you repeat that which you wish was true, it will then become true. When I hear the 2% success rate from cold calls in that recent NY Times poll, and that it took hours to get each successful call, I wonder who, exactly they are reaching. Just a theory, but I find it hard to believe they are reaching an accurate representation of the voting public at large with such an abysmal success rate on the numbers they are calling.
Response rates have been declining since the late 1990’s. It surprised me when polling accuracy did not decline in tandem, but that is the fact.
Has there been yet another big response rate decline since the polls did so well in November 2022? Not that I have seen. As for the one poll you cited, everything here has to be averaged over many surveys.
As always, it is a red flag to see polling challenged in a way that just coincidentally would be good news for the challenger.
Ok. You seem very confident. I just don’t know how we can be so confident this far out, with such a small sample that is clearly not an exact representation of the public at large. Clearly very, very few people are responding to these poll calls. Maybe these vanishingly rare people that actually answer these calls just so happen to be a perfect representation of all parts of the electorate. I doubt it though.
It is not exactly that I am confident that Trump is actually ahead. It is more that the evidence I see of Trump being ahead is based on real data, while contrary evidence is speculation.
The way, month after month, the moves in numbers are small, even when Trump’s legal problems heat up, suggests made up minds and concerns me as a never-Trumper. But the sample size of presidential elections is so small that a Trump supporter would be foolish to be confident.
Re your statement that the New York Times recently got a 2 percent response rate, I cannot find that, but did find a November 2022 article saying that their typical response rate was then 1 percent. Crazy that polling still works more or less as well as before, but it does. (But not perfectly — last link notes problems in Wisconsin polling.)
You see refugees/migrants (now called newcomers) blocking traffic to wash your windshield, the city is cutting services to pay for them and hotels being trashed. And a demagogue says he’s going to ship their asses back? You can see how that is definitely a way to try to break the Democratic hold on urban voters. The way Colorado voters are, if Trump could convince us the newcomers will raise our taxes then the state will go red in 2024.
If that happens, how does one know that they’re migrants? You have to ask them?
(I’ll note the new term for migrants; I’ll leave “refugees” for an appropriate time. Should I spread around the new term? I don’t think it’s going to catch on, but if those are the orders…)
Speculation and you know… actual election results that have gone decisively Democrats way every single election since 2018.
I agree with you, and yet… in those years, the polls showed Democrats running ahead of Republicans, and the election results aligned pretty well with the polls in the end - save for a slightly better Trump showing in 2020 than the polls indicated.
If all that is still the case in 2024, and the polls don’t change a lot between now and when people vote, it’s pretty likely that Donald Trump returns to the White House.
That’s too many “ifs” and “ands” to describe anything as pretty likely.