Source: Encyclopedia Britannica
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Donald Trump won the popular vote by approximately 2.4 million votes, marking the first time a Republican had accomplished such a feat since President George W. Bush won reelection in 2004.
It also means a majority of pollsters have completed the hat trick: for the third consecutive presidential cycle, the polls have missed the mark, vastly underestimating the strength of the former New York real estate tycoon.
The latest election results show Trump with 76,977,118 votes or 49.9% of the vote compared with Vice President Kamala Harris’s 74,479,029 votes or 48.3% of the electorate.
The last election pollsters predicted, correctly, was Obama/Romney in 2012, when Nate Silver catapulted to fame as a wunderkind by correctly predicting not only Barack Obama's victory but the outcome of the presidential contest in all 50 states.
Now, pollsters are about as reliable as a Dallas Cowboys’ quarterback.
Pollsters, of course, much like Donald Trump after losing to Joe Biden in 2020, don’t like to admit defeat.
They now tell us they were right on the money with Harris’ vote percentage (48.3 %) but underestimated the strength of Donald Trump supporters (49.9 %)
Such explanations sound like a badly worded concession speech from a candidate who went down in flames.
Nevertheless, most pollsters continue to argue their polling was not flawed.
Political Scientist, Peter J. Woolley, founding director of PublicMind—an independent public opinion research group at Fairleigh Dickinson University thinks the suggestion that polls have been wrong in the last three presidential elections is a myth.
“Good pollsters,” Woolley says, “are the first to say their work are ‘estimates’ not predictions and not pinpoints. It is media outlets and internet trolls that tend to over-report the accuracy of polls, not good pollsters. Bad pollsters tend to brag about their polls. Good pollsters are always on edge. Good pollsters know that under ideal conditions, one in 20 poll measurements will be ‘wrong.’ Polls are a scientific method of arriving at an estimate. Estimate is the keyword.”
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Most polls I was following one or two months prior to the election, showed Harris with a one or two percentage lead, including The Washington Post, the New York Times, Nate Silver (The Silver Bulletin) and FiveThirtyEight.
On Election Eve, Silver declared Harris a marginal favorite, though his “gut” told him Trump may pull off an upset.
When I asked The New York Times about misfiring on the presidential election vote totals, a spokesperson for the Times, issued the following statement:
"Polls will never be perfectly precise, nor are they advertised as such, and a main feature of our coverage this year was helping readers understand the uncertainty in the race. We made clear in our coverage that if the polls were off by even a little bit from final vote counts, as they were likely to be, that one of the candidates could sweep all seven battlegrounds."
My big beef isn’t so much the accuracy of the polls themselves, but how certain news organizations attached so much prominence to them.
The New York Times, Washington Post, among others, treated these polls, at least from my vantage point, like they were gospel and glaringly splashed these polls across their home pages as if they're credible and reliable sources of information, or at least that was what the reader was led to believe.
Despite the statement released from a Times spokesperson, I rarely saw these polls accompanied with a warning that they shouldn’t be interpreted as being “perfectly precise.”
To their credit, the New York Times did publish articles explaining how tricky the polls can be in accurately predicting the outcome.
Nate Cohn, of the Times, for example, did underscore two weeks before the election, that pollsters might very well have egg splattered on their face for the third straight presidential election. Cohn went on to explain how different polling methods have been recalibrated over the last 15 years to better gauge the mood of the country.
One pollster who was unquestionably off her game was J. Ann Selzer, president of the Des Moines, Iowa-based polling firm Selzer & Company, which she founded in 1996. Selzer, known as the “Queen of Polling” predicted vice president Harris would win Iowa by three percentage points, 47% to 44. By the time the votes were all counted, Selzer was off by 16 points.
Trump ended up winning Iowa by 13 points, 56% to 43%. Selzer, in turn, ended her polling operation altogether as she tries to defend her reputation, which has been badly bruised since the stunning election results.
While a majority of pollsters may continue to staunchly defend their polls as being within the margin of error, most agree that they need to reevaluate how they gather information from potential voters.
Most pollsters agree that they’re increasingly having difficulty identifying Trump supporters. Democrat voters tend to be more civic minded and usually respond to survey questions from pollsters. Trump supporters, on the other hand, are distrustful of pollsters and the media, and have a tendency not to respond to surveys.
In particular, pollsters recognize the need to expand their polling methods beyond online, text, and phone methods and conduct more mail survey forms. Republicans and conservative voters seem more receptive to surveys sent to them in the mail, preliminary studies show.
The Trump campaign was able to focus on low-propensity voters or voters who haven’t consistently voted in the past and were decidedly less “politically engaged.”
Though pollsters can talk until they’re blue in the face about how close their estimates were to the final tally; a David Brooks column highlighted just how disengaged the Democratic ticket was from the average voter.
Brooks wrote: "In 2024, Kamala Harris did worse among Black voters than Joe Biden did in 2020. She did worse among female voters. She did much worse among Latino voters. She did much worse among young voters."
"She did manage,” Brooks explained, “to outperform Biden among two groups: affluent people and white voters, especially white men."
When I saw the seismic shift of the country going into Trump's column on Election Night, I immediately thought of James Carville's opinion piece in the New York Times (July 8, 2024) when he stressed that Kamala can't be just crowned the nominee without a democratic process. Carville wrote, "it can’t be by anointing Vice President Kamala Harris or anyone else as the presumptive Democratic nominee. We’ve got to do it out in the open."
Nancy Pelosi and her cabal stripped the ball from Joe's hands and force-fed Kamala to the American voters instead of creating a mini-primary (as Carville suggested) where the best and the brightest of the party would vie for the nomination. Pelosi did this because she reasoned-we have our progressive candidate who will easily trounce Trump, a convicted felon, as he appeared to be unraveling at the seams and sounding mentally unstable by the day. This was Pelosi and her inner circle's big opportunity to get a progressive into the White House.
Many are going to argue that this proves the country isn't ready for a woman president. That's just plain wrong. The country isn't ready for a progressive female candidate (Hillary & Kamala, for example) who promoted abortion rights and LGBTQ rights at the expense of traditional working-class issues, like economic growth, reduced grocery prices, affordable housing, while ignoring illegal immigration and the plight of Palestinians in Gaza.
The Democrats have kicked the can down the road on immigration and cost of living for way too long, opting instead for the status quo.
For better or worse, richer or poorer, voters reached a tipping point and opted for a candidate who promised to turn the federal government on its head.
God help us, I think we’re in for a tumultuous four years under Donald Trump when the treasured principles of our Republic will be brought to a severe test, but Democrats have only themselves to blame.
--Bill Lucey
November 25, 2024
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