Some recent polls show Trump leading Biden. (I won’t cite specific polls, because they change daily and weekly.) Should Biden supporters (and people who shudder at Trump) worry he might lose the election?
Let’s start with words often attributed* to the immortal baseball philosopher, Yogi Berra: “It’s hard to make predictions, especially about the future.” The election is months away and a lot could happen by then.
My personal view is polls at this stage don’t mean anything. Presidential elections are unpredictable, and obsessing over polls this far in advance is a fool’s errand (or a nervous Nellie’s comfort pillow).
In a normal America, Trump wouldn’t stand a chance, but a lot of Americans aren’t what I consider normal anymore. If we’re going to play the game, are the polls we’re seeing accurate?
There’s reason to believe they might be off. A CNBC story here recounts the big polling misses in 2016, 2020, and 2022 (when polls predicted a “red wave” that didn’t materialize).
It’s not altogether the pollsters’ fault; polling has gotten exponentially more difficult. Many people don’t respond to pollsters, and others lie. (It’s not easy to admit being a Trump supporter.) CNBC notes, “Heading into the 2024 rematch …, pollsters are trying a variety of strategies to … accurately capture the elusive Trump vote.” If they’re overcorrecting, their polls likely show Trump doing better than he actually is.
I’m not throwing this out there as comfort food for nervous anti-Trumpers. We shouldn’t delude ourselves about the threat he presents to orderly government and democracy itself. (This isn’t about issues or policies; it’s about character and behavior.) It’s very clear there’s a large voting bloc willing to ignore his personal flaws.
I don’t know how reliable the polls are, and I don’t think CNBC does either. They just describe the adjustments pollsters are making to overcome the flaws in their previous results. But voters’ moods, like the news backdrop, are fluid and something else may influence them this year. Polling may be too difficult to be accurate.
There are other ways to try predicting the election. You can try political analysis. As I see it, immigration won’t change many votes, but Biden could be hurt by inflation and young voters’ opposition to his Israel policies. Republican candidates, including Trump, continue to be hurt by the GOP’s harsh abortion policies. (Trump recently said he won’t back a nationwide abortion ban, but he lies about everything.)
What about a prognosticator with a track record? Allan Lichtman, a history professor at American University in Washington D.C. (profile here), has correctly called every presidential election since 1984 (except 2000, which he argues was stolen). He says “a lot would have to go wrong for Biden to lose.” (See story here).
Lichtman isn’t throwing darts; he studied past elections to identify the factors that determine election outcomes, and came up with a 13-key test that’s worked well so far. But any prediction method contains a flaw: As in investing, “past performance is no guarantee of future results.”
So I asked my paranormal cat (see my posting here for details). He meowed. I ran this through Google Translate, and I think it means either Trump or Biden by a whisker, or potentially several whiskers.
* If Berra did say this, he borrowed it from somewhere else; the phrase has been traced to an old Danish proverb (see article here).
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