Former Obama Pollster: “Ignore the Polls”
With so much at stake in the 2024 elections, Democrats find themselves anxiously ping-ponging between poll-driven despair and, recently, election results-driven assurance. Biden’s approval ratings and head-to-head matchups against Trump look daunting, to be sure, but wins in Kentucky, Ohio, and Virginia, like those in the midterms last year and other special elections sprinkled between, suggest a well of support for the Democratic agenda. Where should we put our faith, in the polls or election wins?
Count this pollster on the side of those who say to put your faith in the election results. To be clear, it’s not that the polls are wrong. The narrative-setting polls published recently by the New York Times, CNN and CBS are high quality and have a record of being accurate. The numbers are likely to be right… for now. However, my experience managing the polling for Barack Obama through two elections and eight years in the White House suggests that they’re not measuring what analysts believe they are.
Until voters focus on the real choice before them and the issues at stake, job approval and even horserace numbers tell a more complex story than reported. And it will be a while before voters give the election that focus. Hard as it is for the political class to believe, most voters just aren’t paying attention to the choice they will have to make a year from now. Instead, when asked by pollsters to give their approval rating of the president, or even to choose between him and Trump, voters view it as a referendum on President Biden alone. He is being compared, to borrow Biden’s own phrase, to the almighty, not the alternative. As we get closer to the election and the need to choose comes into view, voters begin to view the same questions through a different lens.
Take the question of approval on the economy. A recent Gallup poll shows approval for Biden’s handling of the economy at 37%. Seems bad, for sure. But at a similar point in his presidency, Gallup measured approval for Barack Obama’s handling of the economy at a dismal 26%. No surprise there, though, with unemployment at 9% and the stock market still below its pre-recession peak.
What should be encouraging to Democrats, though, is not the comparison between Biden’s numbers and Obama’s, but what happened to the former president’s numbers over time. By the eve of the election, with unemployment at 7.8% and markets just around where they stood before Obama took office, the president’s economic approval had rebounded 19 points to 45% approval. The economy changed a little, but what really mattered was the change in the context of voters’ answers, as they began to rate Obama against Romney, not against their hopes for a quick recovery.
If voters were answering on Obama’s economic leadership independently, you’d expect that number to keep growing as the economy continued to improve. But the opposite happened. After the election, the economy kept growing, and by the summer of 2013, unemployment was down and the stock markets were up. Without the foil of a presidential opponent, Obama’s economic approval rating fell back down to 35%.
When voters in Ohio, Kentucky, and Virginia gave Democrats wins last week, they were making a choice between two candidates or two sides of an issue. As has been the case in most elections recently, the Democratic side won out.
Doomsayers suggesting that Biden has no chance need to account for the fact that in seven of the last eight presidential elections, Democrats have won at least a plurality of the vote. (The two of those elections they lost, of course, are more of an indictment of the Electoral College than Democratic policies). Candidates as different as Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden, in circumstances as different as the dot-com boom of 1996, the recession of 2008, and the pandemic of 2020, all received more votes than the Republican they faced, and all clocked between 48% and 53% of the vote. A year out of the election, polls gave them as much as 57% or as little as 39% (Obama trailing Romney in December 2011). But on Election Day, voters made a choice strikingly consistent with the choice they made in the past election, but one not predicted by the polls a year earlier.
Does this mean Biden is safe or that he doesn’t have vulnerabilities to address? Of course not. Every election during this era has been close and the distorting impact of the Electoral College means that receiving more votes than his opponent, whoever that may be, might not be enough.
For supporters of President Biden, there’s more work to be done. But perhaps a bit more context around how we understand these polls will allow them to do it with less panic.