2016 U.S. Presidential Election: Almost every major mainstream media news outlet, and even several online media channels such as The Young Turks, were constantly and emphatically predicting a landslide victory for Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton. Of course, the very opposite happened.
2020 U.S. Presidential Election: Similarly, the headlines seem to always say that Joe Biden holds a lead over incumbent U.S. President Donald Trump, though often times they say the lead isn’t too great. Certainly, nobody is predicting a landslide victory for Biden(other than maybe the dementia-afflicted Biden himself), much like many very wrongly did for Hillary Clinton in 2016.
So then why are the polls, despite all the decoration, fanfare, prestige, and hype, so prone to getting their predictions wrong, even dead wrong as in the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election?
First of all, there is bias among the organizations doing the polling. Many of them are left-leaning, vote Democrat, and therefore want to use their polls as marketing tools to influence the electorate to vote Democrat, as the poll organizers want. This is why many times these polls will purposefully oversample those who have voted Democrat before, or will likely do so in the upcoming election –> Think about all the radical millennial socialists of California, New York, Portland, Seattle, Chicago and so forth. Additionally, the wording of the question can often skew the responses – an example will be provided later.
Second, a lot of bullying influences and skews the polling results. Especially for voters who have typical corporate, W-2 based, jobs, and men. Let’s take employed voters. In order to avoid being bullied, molested, or potentially fired from one’s job, employees often times feel they must exercise restrain in stating their intention to vote Republican. Forget about stating any intention to vote Trump if you’d like to keep your job and only income source to feed your family. This is despite the so-called push for diversity, tolerance, and respect for those with different viewpoints. Diversity is welcomed, but excludes conservatives, Trump supporters, or generally anyone who wants to see a reduction in the size and scope of the state – also known as the dominance of liberty at all costs.
For men, many wouldn’t dare state their intention to vote Republican, especially for Trump, to avoid the risk of seeing their wives divorce them or their girlfriends break up with them. Shame on those wives and girlfriends who bully and disrespect their partners in that way – imagine the backlash if it was the other way around! So, while many male voters have to be in the closet about their true intentions to vote Republican and/or Trump, they, like many who are employed, will state that they will vote Democrat, or at least that they won’t vote Trump.
Polls generally do not filter these variables that clearly skew the polling results. Of course, responsible pollsters would.
Third, all polling organizations in the U.S. have computerized calling and computerized data banks of phone numbers with a record of their previous responses. This makes it all too easy to program the phones to ask the “right people”, meaning those who tend to vote in accordance with the desires of the poll creators, to produce the responses that the pollsters want the public to know, even if the responses are quite biased. The only thing that keeps the poll creators semi-honest is their desire to avoid being too far off the final result lest they get discredited. Generally, polls can’t skew the results more than 10 points without risking failure.
Lastly, this author would be remiss to not cover the critical distinction between asking what voters intend vs. what voters EXPECT. While polls tend to indicate that voters intend to vote Democrat, polls seem to indicate that many EXPECT Trump to be the winner in the upcoming 2020 election, even though the expectation runs contrary to the intention.
Jim Rickards, a reputable economist and editor of many financial newsletters such as the 5 Min. Forecast, was one of the very few minority voices that publicly predicted Donald Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016. While one may think “oh well, he just made a lucky guess”, this author is not so inclined to believe that as lots of credible detailed reasons were provided by Rickards to back up his bold, and ultimately accurate, prediction.
“The polls are riddled with errors,” Rickards explains, “including oversampling Democrats, polling ‘all voters’ instead of ‘likely voters’ and organizing and framing questions in such a way to lead the subject to a predetermined conclusion about Biden as their choice for president by starting with questions that cast Trump in a bad light.” –> This part especially, is a prime example of how the wording of the polling question produces polling bias, as described earlier.
Not that Trump has it in the bag, though: “Biden’s lead is simply too big to discount” — to say nothing of Biden’s lead in key states.
“Biden is up 7 points in Pennsylvania. It’s almost impossible for Trump to win if he does not take Pennsylvania. Even if the polls are skewed (they are), a statistical adjustment would still leave Biden with a 3–4 point lead. That’s a lot to overcome in just three months. Rickards’ words follow below:
“That said, there is some highly persuasive scientific research on polling that says Trump will win,” Jim explains.
It’s the difference between asking someone “Who would you vote for?” versus “Who do you think will win?” It’s the difference between asking voters about their intentions versus their expectations.
“Over hundreds of elections for many decades,” Jim says — and he’s going back to the 1940s — “the answer to the expectation question is far more accurate in predicting outcomes than the answer to the intention question.”
That’s because asking the expectation question has the effect of growing a pollster’s sample size, perhaps by orders of magnitude.
“You’re asking about their expectation based on the likely actions of everyone they know. This social network includes family members, neighbors, co-workers and even total strangers with whom one might chat about politics…
“If your base sample is 1,300 respondents and the average social network of each participant is 50 people, then the sample size on the expectation question is 65,000 people. This much larger sample size means a much smaller margin of error and a much more accurate forecast.”
“This analysis is not just a hypothesis. Its validity is borne out by decades of hard data,” Jim asserts.
Key point: At times when the answers to the intention question and the expectation question diverge… the expectation question is the more accurate predictor of the outcome.
And yes, there’s a divergence right now. “The average response to the intention question shows Biden with a 49.3%-to-40.7% lead over Trump. But the average response to the expectation question shows Trump with a 55%-to-45% lead over Biden.
“The research shows the expectation question has the right forecast 78% of the time when the two polls disagree. Putting this data together and using the best available science shows that Trump is the favorite to beat Biden according to the latest polls.”
While it remains to be seen whether Trump will win another four years in the White House, all of the above needs to be taken into consideration in assessing the credibility of polls, especially those by the mainstream media that have openly shown unprecedented bias against a sitting U.S. President.
Perhaps there is no better time to press the organizer of these polls, as well as the media pundits that flash them so often, to answer some critical questions such as:
- How did you ensure randomness in your sample selection? Did you really make sure not to over sample those that have historically voted Democrat, or to oversample those that historically vote Republican, or any other party?
- How can you assure the public that your bias as a pollster doesn’t diminish the objectivity and credibility of your poll results?
- Do you factor in the possibility that people may be afraid to expose their true voting intentions on election day, which would in turn lead them to answer the pre-election polls in ways that contradict how they ultimately vote on election day? If so how?
- Do you also ask these same voter samples what their expectation is and then make contrasts between expectations and intentions?
- Perhaps most importantly, given how dead wrong you were in 2016, why should we trust you now? What have you learned? How have your methods improved?
This above list of questions is by no means comprehensive, as many more valid ones can, and should, be asked, rather than taking the pre-election poll results as credible solely on the basis of their face-value. This author encourages the audience to demand answers to the above-stated questions, at a bare minimum.
There’s no reason to let pre-election polls ever fool us.
After all, not too many people like believing pre-election polls that end up being dead wrong. Do you?
Trump will not get this author’s vote, nor will Joe Biden. Regardless, this author is predicting Trump to win in 2020, even if most polls that reach most people’s attention would have the public believe the contrary.