by David Catron
During the two months since President Biden delivered his State of the Union address, a wide variety of legacy news outlets have been at pains to portray an infinitesimal improvement in his polling as a shift of momentum in the presidential race. Last week, for example, USA Today breathlessly reported that “Trump and Biden are ‘darn near even’ in the 2024 election.” If this was meant to provide moral sustenance for worried Democrats it was thin gruel indeed. Biden is an incumbent president struggling to keep up with a challenger most of whose time and money has been devoted to fighting off a ruthless lawfare campaign. Moreover, if history is any guide, it’s probable that the polls understate the strength of Trump’s support.
At present, the RealClearPolitics average indicates that Trump holds a narrow national lead. But the averages that really matter are those which show him ahead in all seven of the battleground states where the election will be decided. It’s a good bet that they are, once again, underestimating the number of votes that will be cast for Trump. Lest you have forgotten amidst the economic and cultural chaos that has attended the return of “the adults” to power, the 2020 polls undercounted Trump voters by wider margins than in 2016. At length, the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) commissioned a task force to assess how badly the polls performed. The conclusion was brutal:
Public opinion polls ahead of the 2020 election were the most inaccurate in a generation … The task force found that polling during the two weeks before the election overstated support for then-Democratic nominee Joe Biden by 3.9 percentage points, which was the largest polling error since 1980 when support for Democratic nominee Jimmy Carter was overestimated by 6 percentage points. The presidential election between Biden, the eventual winner, and incumbent president Donald Trump was much closer than polling had indicated.
The leader of the task force, political scientist Josh Clinton of Vanderbilt University, insisted the problem had nothing to do with partisan bias on the part of the pollsters, but this is hard to swallow considering that the three most egregious polling failures of the past four decades (1980, 2016 and 2020) all overstated voter support for Democrats. It becomes even less credible after perusing figure 11 of the full AAPOR report which frankly admits, “It is immediately obvious that polls overstated the Biden-Trump margin in nearly every state.” Nor was this phenomenon restricted to the presidential race. The 2020 generic ballot favored the Democrats most of the year, yet the Republicans flipped 15 House seats for a net gain of 12.
So, unless the pollsters have solved the problems that plagued them in the last two presidential elections, it’s probable that Trump’s actual support among voters is stronger than his polling suggests. This is particularly important in 2024 because Trump, for the first time ever, has maintained a consistent lead in most national and swing state polls since last fall. This was never true in 2016 or 2020. It’s obviously difficult to say precisely how far off the polls are this time, but if they are understating Trump’s support as much as they did four years ago, he will win most of the crucial battleground states and the general election. Is this a real possibility? William A. Galston at the Brookings Institution takes it very seriously indeed.
