Why the Polls Could Be Wrong

I’ve decided it’s okay to indulge in optimism. It is very possible the polls are wrong, especially regarading Kamala Harris’s base of support. See Justin Brown at Politico, for example, who argues there are Harris voters the pollsters are missing.

In this election cycle, pollsters have made a clear effort to explore various methodologies that enable a deeper dive into Trump’s areas of support that were previously underrepresented in past polling. But when asked about the challenge of tracking an abbreviated Harris campaign in the wake of an historic candidate swap, some pollsters believed that the polling transition from Biden to Harris would be “relatively seamless.”

Justin Brown makes a persuasive argument that the polling companies, who had adjusted and fine-tuned how they “weighted” the data to be sure they were not undercounting Trump voters, have no clue about Harris voters. For example, the much discussed Ann Selzer poll that shows Harris ahead of Trump in Iowa found that older voters, expecially women, were moving in the direction of Harris. Many are also questioning if the pollsters have fully integrated the effect of the Dobbs decision into their projections. See Marcy Wheeler,  Male Pollsters Shocked — Shocked!! — When a Woman Pollster Discovers Women Voters.

It’s also the case that a lot of those older women are registered Republicans. And this takes us to another question — are the pollsters finding the “Liz Cheney” Republicans who are voting for Harris to stop Trump? See Josh Marshall on this point.

See also Final GOP push in Pennsylvania focuses on imaginary voters over real ones by Philip Bump at WaPo. He observed GOTV activity in Scranton, Pennsylvania.

As I did in 2016 and 2020, I traveled to Scranton to see how the campaigns were tackling this task. Both of my prior visits were, at least in retrospect, revealing. In 2016, I was surprised to see little activity for Hillary Clinton’s campaign and a bustling turnout operation for Donald Trump. Four years later, it was Joe Biden — who often speaks of the time he spent in Scranton as a child — who was running an effective operation. Trump’s supporters seemed to be more focused on handing out lawn signs and boisterous parades of trucks.

In other words, in 2016 and 2020, the campaigns with the more robust GOTV field operations in Scranton (and presumably across the state) ended up winning. In Scranton in 2024, that was clearly the operation being run by Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign and its allies.

On the other hand, volunteers at a Trump office were being trained to be poll watchers, not canvassers.

Those volunteers, though, weren’t going out to turn out voters. Instead, Medeiros was helping them fill out the documents they’d need to be poll watchers on Election Day. Others were being trained to be greeters, welcoming people at polling places and providing information about Republican candidates. The focus was on managing those who came out to vote, not on making sure they came out in the first place.

Back in April, the then-new co-chair of the Republican Party, the Republican nominee’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump, made clear that poll-watching would be a central focus for the party in November. It was an institutional bet on the idea that Trump’s 2020 loss was attributable not to having more Biden voters turn out, but to that pro-Biden majority being a function of some wrongdoing at the polls. Never mind that there were poll watchers in 2020, too (including some I spoke to then). The party would in 2024 have its volunteers combat imaginary illegal voters instead of turning out real, legal ones.

Well, we’ll see how that worked, or not, by the end of this week. Maybe the election will be a squeaker. But it’s very possible that the polls are wrong, and if so they are more likely undercounting Harris support than Trump support.

Looking at the closeness of the election from another angle — Matt Yglesias, in the New York Times, points out that around the world post-pandemic voters are turning out incumbents. This applies to both left-wing and right-wing incumbents. And this is mostly about inflation, apparently.

It appears that the unhappy electorates are unhappy in fundamentally the same way. Inflation spiked, largely because household spending patterns seesawed so abruptly during and after a global pandemic, and though it’s been tamed, prices of many goods have not fallen to what voters remember, and what’s more, the process of taming has involved higher interest rates, which in their own way raise the cost of living. The question of why, exactly, voters so hate inflation — which increases wages and prices symmetrically — has long puzzled economists. But the basic psychology seems to be: My pay increase reflects my hard work and talent, while the higher prices I am paying are the fault of the government.

Harris is swimming against the tide, so to speak. Yglesias thinks the real question ought to be, not why is it so close? but why isn’t Trump running away with this? And the answer is, basically, that Trump 2024 is a really terrible candidate who should have listened to his advisers and stay focused on the economy instead of pet-eating immigrants. See also Michael Tomasky at The New Republic, Donald Trump Has Lost His Sh*t.

I understand there is some indication in some polls that late-deciding voters are more often deciding for Harris, but other polls contradict that. So, basically, nobody really knows what’s going on out there. Until we know something, I say we might as well give our nerves a little rest and be optimistic.

Tomorrow I intend to be here commenting sporadically as the returns start coming in, and you are welcome to drop by.

6 thoughts on “Why the Polls Could Be Wrong

  1. "Yglesias thinks the real question ought to be, not why is it so close? but why isn’t Trump running away with this?"

    My question is why is Stump even a choice? The fucking guy is a pant shiting imbecile who has been convicted of 34 felonies, found liable for rape, incited a mob to attack the Capitol, has threatened democrats with military tribunals, threatened to use the military on American citizens, said Liz Cheney should be shot, I could go on for at least an hour. How the fuck is he even viable is my question? The answer is our corporate media has made him viable. Stump is the President they want, he's a non-stop chaos content generator.

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    • That it’s even close at all.  I mean…  And that it seems likely Trump will maintain support after lying about any outcome, after proving he’s a pathological liar. 

      The mind-numbing tribalism I can understand. “What are all these brown people doing here all of a sudden?”, sure.  Stress from high cost of living, yup.  The need for cognitive closure too. 

      But to support a lying sack of goofball who obviously doesn’t actually care about his tribe, or all the brown people, or financial worries, or cognitive anything, sure seems symptomatic of deeper issues. 

      Should we also blame the Reality TV crowd?  I personally don’t get that stuff.  I couldn’t care less about a bunch of entitled real housewives scripted to constantly backstab each other.  I wonder where all the “most trusted man in America” faithful went.  But then I did catch my quietly pious and monkish preacher father watching WWE.  I said, “Comeon dad, it’s all fake.”  He said: “Yeah I know.  But that Cody Rhodes is the best!”  I slowly realized he was being completely serious.

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    • That is exactly THE QUESTION: why/how is he even on the ballot?  Even if Harris pulls out a win, even if she wins in a surprising landslide – the fact that America devolved to the point of that psycho clown being considered a viable and legitimate presidential candidate by perhaps at least half of voters is simply evidence of how disastrously hopeless we may be politically.  Walter Cronkite died not long after we had the audacity to elect a black man with a foreign-sounding name, I believe truth was on its way to death at about the same time.

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  2. Here in fly over land, nothing is going on.  Well, it is raining for once and there is finally a chill in the air.  We have almost a total lack of yard signage.  I have not sighted even one jacked-up carbon belching pickup truck flailing Trump flags.  Even ' I voted' stickers are scarce, though advanced voting started a week or more ago.  

    No one seems to care one lick about Floride in the water systems, one way or another.  RFK and a Libertarian are on the ballot, and I would not be shocked if both got near 10% of the vote statewide.  For those who remember Ross Perot, a third-party horror of years ago, he got his biggest support here.  We are all about lost causes and hopeless cases in these parts.  Trump just has not deteriorated to the point of generating renewed excitement this election with that pity crowd.  A good percentage of them could just wait this one out.  In four years, we should have the second coming of Bob Dole.  Then baby, things will be rocking big time!

     

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  3. The polls are always wrong, which way they are wrong this time we will only know tomorrow. It isn't hard to pick the winner of a two horse race of course so about 50% of pollsters wil say they got it right, but how right is the question.
    One of the reasons for this in in an effectively two party system like the USA or ours in the UK, uncommitted people tend to vote fot the least bad choice rather than positively suporting a candidate. From a statistical point of view it is difficult to frame questions that will draw a reliable anwser from such people as emotional influences can cause them to oscillate from one candidate to another.

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  4. I don't have the article at my fingertips but a pollster last week said that polls are always wrong. Yes, a particular poll may be right for a single state but nobody gets ALL the swing states right in the final poll. The average variance (as I recall) was over 2 points.

    If the variance is a random and dispersed error, it might affect both candidates equally. But what if it's a systemic and consistent error across the majority of swing states? It's a big "what if" but we will see if the Iowa prediction pans out. And we'll see if it's true across all (or nearly all) of the battleground states. 

    I've read reports with photographic support, that Trump's rallies today did not draw big crowds. Harris did. Tomorrow is the vote – that's the basis of the decision who will be president. Not rallies. But if the enthusiasm (or lack of) indicates what will happen, we will do well tomorrow. 

    My prayer is that Harris wins in several ways, not because we need a blowout to validate her victory but because Trump can't prevent certification in several states. (He may not be able to hang up even one,) If the race hinges on just PA, Trump will do anything and everything to sabotage certification there, but if NC and NV provide an alternate path to 270, the task for Trump becomes difficult bordering on impossible. (NC and PA both have Democratic governors.) 

    IMO, Trump wanted GA to be the pivotal state because the fix is in there. I think that won't be the case and Trump may have a difficult task ahead of him. Tomorrow night may be long.

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