Polls Favor Biden: Is It Different This Time?

Ari Paul

It’s starting to build: Media are buzzing that the Democratic Party’s likely nominee for president, Joe Biden, has a polling edge against President Donald Trump. And a big one at that.

The Hill (8/12/20) said Biden is leading in some key battleground states. Politico (8/11/20) shows Biden with a 10-point national lead. Real Clear Politics is constantly updating its aggregation of polls, but as of now shows an overwhelming advantage for Biden. The Wisconsin State-Journal (8/10/20) reported that Biden is polling well in the all-important battleground state. And CNN (8/16/20) said that Biden went into the convention with a “historically strong” polling position.

Should headlines like these (CNN, 8/16/20) make Democrats uneasy?

And why shouldn’t we believe that the odds are against Trump? USA Today (8/9/20) reported that unemployment is still at historic highs. The Covid-19 pandemic still rages in the United States, not only killing more than a thousand people a day, but hobbling the economy and turning going back to school into a death-defying act. Team Trump is looking to curb mail-in voting (Politico, 8/8/20) and even floating the idea of postponing the election (NBC, 7/30/20), both indications of desperation.

But, of course, 2016 taught us a lot about polls: Even though many polls showed that Hillary Clinton was ahead, things were closer than they often appeared, with some  media giving the impression that Clinton had won before it was over. Poll expert Sam Wang was so confident that Clinton would win that he promised to eat a bug on TV if he was wrong, which he did (CNN, 11/12/16). The New York Times (10/18/16) gave Clinton a whopping 91% chance of winning. Polling groups like Pew Research (11/9/16) embarked on self-reflection about how their predictions in 2016 could have been more accurate.

Today’s polling almost comes with the understanding that media need to be more careful in interpreting these numbers. So we all need to ask, “Is it different this time?”

Wayne Steger, a professor of political science at DePaul University, told FAIR: “Biden’s lead in national and battleground states is bigger than Clinton’s was in 2016 at this time, so he has more cushion to absorb variations due to voter turnout.”

“Trump and Clinton both had historic negative ratings,” he added. “This year, that is only true of Trump. That means Trump has a much higher hill to climb in 2020 than in 2016.” Steger noted that pollsters are taking more into account than last time: “Education is something that more pollsters seem to be using in their weighting of sample respondents, so polls should be even more accurate with respect to the vote.”

Historian Allan Lichtman's model (New York Times, 8/5/20) predicts a Biden victory—though it takes some squinting.

Also in Biden’s favor is the Lichtman test (New York Times, 8/5/20). Allan Lichtman, a historian at American University, has predicted all but one presidential outcome since 1980 — he got Trump right, however, and also rightly predicted he’d be impeached (NPR, 5/12/19)—with a set of 13 questions that are divorced from polling numbers, but instead reflect on historical voting outcomes related to the incumbent party’s successes and failures.

But even Lichtman’s clairvoyance is fragile. For one, his prediction in the Times only gives Biden a slight advantage. More than that, he deducted two points from Trump on the ground that he is not charismatic, based on the idea that his antics only appeal to a small segment of the public, and that he has not had any major foreign policy successes. Trump’s entire persona is based on his stage presence — whether one likes him or not, it’s impossible to deny that he draws eyeballs.

And Trump could point to his pulling out of the Iran deal and revising NAFTA as evidence that he is both a tough actor and a pragmatic negotiator. As John Yoo co-wrote in a pro-Trump op-ed in the New York Post (8/10/20):

The Trump Doctrine is about renewing American sovereignty.... Protecting that sovereignty has led Team Trump to withdraw from multilateral agreements that limit US freedom of action, including economic action, such as the Paris climate accords, or that place it at a disadvantage to competitors such as China and Russia, such as the outmoded Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty.

Every voter won’t see these as good things—some will consider them disasters, and redouble their support for Biden—but the Trump campaign can certainly portray them as international milestones. In addition, Trump can use his decision to move the US embassy to Jerusalem to prop up his image as the most pro-Israel candidate (The Hill, 2/26/19). The main point is that the Lichtman test is based on some subjective interpretation.

Politico (6/17/20) reports that polling today still suffers from some of the same problems that misread the tea leaves four years ago. Nate Silver (538, 8/12/20), whose website is one of the top outlets for poll coverage, said that it’s simply too early to count Trump out of the race, despite what polling data say. (Historically, polls are much more accurate two months before the election than they are three months out—New York Times, 5/25/16.)

These big numbers could potentially backfire on Biden, creating a sense of security that all is sealed. A “we got this in the bag” attitude could keep the Biden ticket from putting in the hard work it takes to unseat an incumbent president. It might also keep the anti-Trump voter from donating to the campaign, going to swing states and knocking on doors, all the things that need to happen to win an election.

And as Jamelle Bouie wrote at the New York Times (8/4/20), Trump still has the potential to eke out an Electoral College victory, even if Biden wins the popular vote.

All of this is to say that Biden’s lead in the polls shouldn’t be treated as a foregone conclusion. Not that polling should be ignored, but this is a time for media to focus less on fluctuations in polling data and more on the reasons why citizens should cast their votes.

Featured image: Real Clear Politics' chart of national polling averages. (The blue line is Joe Biden, the red line is Donald Trump.)