Trust me, don’t trust the polls.
There’s an old idea in politics: don’t trust the polls. Like many old ideas it’s not exactly true, but never has it been more true than in this Presidential election. I feel confident that if the general election was held today, there would be a Democratic trifecta. Most surprisingly, Joe Biden would be re-elected. I am in a growing, but still rather miniscule, minority in thinking two particular events will/would occur: A: Biden will win in November and B: If the election was today, he would win. Trust me, I’m not crazy, just hear me out. Yes he is down in the polls, especially when its a 3, 4 or 5 way race and while they are one way to check the electorate’s political vital signs, the polls are significantly over-estimating the support of one person and his following, that person being, the infamous former president Donald Trump and his MAGA supporters.
Most polling averages have Trump up by about two points in a 5 way race. There are four reasons that I believe if the election was held today the results would hugely differ from the polls. The first reason is: Biden is, especially now, not a very exciting candidate, he doesn’t exactly exhilarate people, (something I dove into in my last piece: Why everyone hates Joe Biden). When polled people aren’t excited to support Joe Biden, most people view their vote for Biden as a vote against Trump, so when someone who will vote for Biden gets that call, “Who will you be voting for in the Presidential election?” The large majority will say “Biden”, some will say “Unsure” or a 3rd party candidate in protest of Biden and a very small group might even, in simple objection, say “Trump”. That’s the problem with polls, they have no real weight. It won’t be easy for people to stand in the voting booth and choose Trump, they’ll have seen him indicted, cross-examined, say horrible things, direct a mob on the Capitol and be impeached twice. That will ultimately be the Biden campaign’s guardian angel: the guilt of a vote for Trump.
The second reason is the fact that Trump has, in a way, convinced his voters to not vote. He has repeatedly promoted rhetoric about elections being stolen, something most of his supporters at least somewhat believe. Well, if you tell someone their vote doesn’t matter- then why should they vote in the first place? Especially if it takes a trek through the perils of the stormy winter that plagues November in the United States. These difficulties are even greater for rural voters, 60% of which voted for Trump in 2016, not to mention those in major swing states like Pennsylvania, which in 2020 had about 20% of its voters identifying as living in rural areas. You don’t need to go anywhere or take time off of work to answer a poll, you just need to pick up a phone or click a link but voting is a lot harder.
The third reason is abortion and Trump’s heinous record with Women’s rights. Democrats did far better than expected in 2022, expanding their lead in the Senate and barely losing the house. This was largely credited to their campaigning on abortion rights as Roe v Wade was overturned only months prior.The Republican party has fundamentally misunderstood how many people actually want a national abortion ban. In 2022 and 2023, two major swing states of the past two decades both had state constitutional amendments on the ballot which would guarantee abortion rights. Ohio has become more of a Republican stronghold in recent times, going for Trump by 8 points in 2020 and 2016, but passed the measure by 13 points — no Presidential candidate, Democrat or Republican, has even won Ohio by those margins since 1988. Michigan has been shifting away from the Democratic party recently, being a part of the infamous ‘blue wall’ that Trump broke in 2016 when Trump won by 0.2 votes and Biden by about 2.8 in 2020, however, it also passed by 13 points, despite not supporting any candidate like that since Obama almost 16 years ago. One other example is the deep red state Kentucky, which has voted for Republicans on the Presidential level every time this century, in 2022 had a Constitutional Amendment on the ballot which would directly state that there was no right to abortion and the government could not fund it in any way. Well, the measure failed by 15 points, despite being a traditionally Democratic policy in a deep red state — they haven’t voted for a Democrat by such margins since 1964. Finally, we have Kansas, who, in 2022, had a constitutional Amendment on the ballot which would remove the right to abortion from it’s Constitution which lost by 18 points.Again, a Democratic policy in a deep red state which has literally never voted for a Democrat by such high margins in it’s 154 years of participating in Presidential elections. This will hurt the Trump campaign, as he was the one who nominated 3 justices to the Supreme Court of which made up the majority of those dissenting against Roe, something he openly and frequently brags about. Not to mention, a court actually ruling that he is a rapist, and his troubled record with respect towards women as well as his constant flip flopping on the abortion issue. They are practically handing the Biden team their campaign ads on a silver platter.
The fourth and final reason is the ‘spoiler effect’ and strategic voting. If you didn’t know, the spoiler effect is defined as “to a situation where the entry of a losing candidate affects the results of an election” Currently Biden does a lot worse when it’s more than a two way race, when candidates like Robert F Kennedy Jr, Jill Stein and Cornel West are included- Biden does worse because its a protest. For most, a vote for Biden is reluctant at best. But, when people get to the booth in November, they won’t want to waste their vote and will choose either of the two mainstream candidates. Not to mention, many states don’t even have Robert F Kennedy Jr, (who I did a deep dive into here), or the Green Party on the ballot so their voters will be forced to vote for ‘the lesser of two evils’ or not at all. In 2020, the polls over-represented the Libertarian and Green parties by about 0.6 percentage points each, in 2016, when, like 2024, both candidates were inherently unpopular and carried the same enthusiasm problem, the polls overrepresented Libertarian candidates and Green party candidates by 1.7 and 0.8 percentage points respectively. That is even more the case now- when a prominent figure, Robert Kennedy, is running as an independent. However, a majority of his supporters, when polled, couldn’t point him out in a photo.
It’s a good rule of thumb to take the polls with a grain of salt. It’s an even better of a rule to try and not let the polls discourage you, they make flashy headlines, for MSNBC and Newsmax alike, but they don’t always accurately reflect the state of the union. They are meant to be the vitals for the country’s politics and often they are but here, today, voters are angry and both candidates are inherently unpopular but only one will have (and has had) his name dragged through the mud in court. Whereas the other will stand up for a generally popular idea in America. So the polls aren’t wrong, they’re just warped — trust me don’t trust the polls.
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