If you’re like me, you’ve spent a lot of time recently reading about — and listening to people talk about — presidential polls. I keep reading and hearing that the race is a toss-up, or worse, that Donald Trump is leading. I don’t buy it. These are the same pollsters who told us Hillary Clinton was a lock in 2016, that Joe Biden would win easily in 2020, and to prepare for a “red wave” in 2022. The polling for those three elections was all over the place and mostly wrong. Polling itself appeared to be broken. What has changed in 2024?
According to a Pew Research analysis, in the 2020 election there were 29 pollsters of record, and nearly all of them used the live-phone-call method. Now that it’s known that hardly anyone, particularly young voters, ever answers an unknown phone call, that methodology is considered unreliable — hopelessly skewed toward lonely geezers desperate to talk to anyone.
In the wake of the 2022 election’s miscalculations, Pew says most pollsters now use combinations of live calling, emailed opt-in surveys, online opt-in surveys, and “probability based panels,” whatever that may be.
Pollsters then take the results of their surveys of, say, 1,237 people, and “weight” them, using various percentage models, trying to suss out how many young voters will turn out, how many Republicans who pull an early ballot will vote for a Democrat, how many women of both parties will vote for abortion rights, how the large contingent of independent voters will swing, how likely a “likely voter” is to vote. Bear in mind, they don’t know any of this information. They’re estimating these weighted numbers and hoping to get an accurate prediction of election results for 150 million voters by extrapolating, typically, from fewer than 3,000 voters.
In a New York Times analysis of the 2020 election, Larry J. Sabato, a professor at the University of Virginia discussed how the electorate had changed from 2016: “Trump’s appeal to college-educated whites, especially women, was never very strong. Trump’s character and antics in office sent his backing among this large group plummeting. Blue-collar and rural whites loved it, but their numbers could not substitute for losses elsewhere.”
Does anyone really think Trump has strengthened his appeal to women and college-educated whites in the past four years? I don’t. And polls, for what they’re worth, show just the opposite has happened.
And consider this: In the 2020 presidential election, population density was arguably the single most-dominant element. Biden won the presidency while carrying only 16 percent of America’s counties. In fact, the most reliable predictor of voting patterns in the United States in recent years is rural versus urban/suburban. And guess which of these is declining in population. Hint: It’s not cities and suburbs. Rural and small-town America are shrinking under the crushing double whammy of corporate farming and the Walmart-ization of local town-square businesses. Trump won 84 percent of America’s counties, but his human voter base is shriveling. Acreage doesn’t vote. I find that encouraging when considering how 2024 might turn out.
Here’s another way to look at the race: Use your own eyes and ears. Look at the large, noisy, rabid turnout for Kamala Harris’ events and contrast that with the half-empty, sad-trombone “rallies” of Donald Trump rambling on for two hours, doing his “Scary Home Companion” riffs as his cult-fans trek to the exits. His campaign reminds me of the Seinfeld “Festivus” episode, with its “airing of grievances” and “feats of strength” rituals.
Does any of this say “momentum” to you? It doesn’t to me.
Trump has never gotten more than 47 percent of the electorate to vote for him. His “platform” consists of trying to scare his (mostly) white supporters with horror stories about Black and brown people stealing their jobs, eating their pets, taking over cities, and committing horrific crimes. Oh, and LGBTQ people are coming to change your gender and make you marry them. So be very afraid and vote GOP, because we’re like you: Real Americans!
What percentage of Americans will fall for this pseudo-fascist act in 2024 is still unknown, but it’s never been a majority of us, which is a comfort of sorts. The scariest part, as always, is the waiting. Well, that and the Electoral College. And now I’m worried again. Dang it.