Many liberal news outlets have in recent months been trumpeting polls that show President Trump losing to virtually every contender for the 2020 Democratic nomination. In head-to-head matchups, Trump fares poorly, and based on polls alone, his prospects for reelection to a second term in office seem slim. He is losing in the polls with pretty much every demographic, and they show him bleeding support from independents and Republican moderates that helped propel him into the White House. The majority of Americans don’t support him, he has multiple investigations opened against him and his family, and an economy that many believe is impossible to sustain through next year’s election. All in all, things seem bleak for the president.
But if you’re a Trump fan, there is good reason for you not to despair. The polls showing Trump losing to a Democratic candidate are run by the very same people who said Hillary Clinton would win in 2016. Not only did they say she would be victorious, but it was predicted that she would win by a landslide – a historic landslide. Instead, as we know, Trump grabbed enough electoral votes to become the 45th president.
So why are the polls wrong? Some are biased – weighting the poll in a way that will show a Democrat beating the president. In the 2016 election, many pollsters assumed that Democrats would have a higher turnout than Republican and weighted their polls based on that. They were wrong and therefore so were their polls. The same could possibly be happening this election cycle, but it is hard to know in advance.
I think the number one reason that polls are probably wrong is because of the shame the media piles on to Trump supporters. The media has been ruthless against Trump and his fans, attacking his every move. It is no longer possible to determine whether a story is major or minor – the mainstream media covers them both with the same vitriol and hate of Trump and conservatives. When one openly calls themselves a Trump fan, the media treats them with disdain and acts as if they are mentally deranged. So many people have simply stopped being open supporters of President Trump, electing to instead stay quiet about their approval for his policies and to continue voting for him anonymously at the ballot box.
While polls have been relied upon for decades to get a feel for which candidate the majority of Americans desire in the White House and other elected offices, those polls have become, due to media bias, far less reliable.
I appreciate your effort, but you are sadly off mark.
Polls and predictions are two different things.
The polls in 2016 said that more people would vote for clinton than trump. And guess what, 3 million more people voted for Clinton than trump.
The predictions, based on probabilities, indicated that hillary would would win – they gave her a 90% chance of winning, based on a few key states. As it turns out, 80,000 votes in three states gave Trump the electoral win.
The polls were right.
The predictions of probability are just that. Probability. If I tell you that if you flip a coin and there is a 50% chance of it landing on heads. That is probability. If you flip that coin and get tails 10 times in a row, that does not mean that the probability was wrong.
Please go back and study a bit more before you provide unscientific statements about polls being wrong. Polls that are run scientifically can be very accurate. In the case of the Trump head-to-head – they are accurate. Millions more people will vote for the D candidate than Trump. But since the presidency is based on electoral votes, he could win based on some flukes in a few swing states.
That is all.
@cringe. You are mistaken. Most polling is (and was) based around the electoral map, since that is the way to win an election. Very few polls focus on the popular vote. The polls Shlomo is referring to are focused on electoral votes for the most part. This whole focus by the left on the popular vote is silly, nobody is campaigning to win the popular vote.