You will remember that in 2016, almost every prediction by the pundits, backed up by almost every reputable poll, had Hillary Clinton defeating Donald Trump with ease. And in 2020, most forecasters predicted that Trump would suffer a massive defeat at the hands of Joe Biden. Of course, Trump triumphed in ‘16 and in ‘20 came within 50,000 votes in three states of winning a second term. Thus, we can reasonably conclude that election polls and predictions should be taken with a grain of salt.
After years of overstating the importance of the national popular vote and understating the only measure that matters in a presidential election, the Electoral College, both parties understand that the seven battleground states of the Rust Belt and Sun Belt, where Trump and Kamala Harris are flooding the zone, are essentially the whole ballgame in 2024.
In fairness to the polling organizations, support for Trump is undoubtedly the most difficult to quantify because of the so-called “hidden Trump voters” who are either hard to reach, reluctant to admit their preference for fear of being ostracized, or are loathe to participate in any survey conducted by big corporate, i.e. anti-Trump, media. But off-target forecasts have a long history dating back to 1948, when 50 out of 50 journalists covering the race between Thomas Dewey and incumbent Harry Truman predicted an easy Dewey victory, to the point that many of them stopped covering the campaign in its final weeks. Truman famously shocked everyone with a decisive win.
After such a major misfire, the issue of how accurate, predictive, and trustworthy polls and pundit predictions actually are has become a quadrennial question. Every four years, partisans on both sides are prone to either celebrate or dismiss the latest surveys while clinging to the rosy predictions of their preferred authors and commentators. And there have been plenty of predictions from both conservatives and liberals in every presidential election this century that turned out to be premature and/or downright embarrassing.
A Long History of Failed Predictions
In September of 2000, left-wing Slate proclaimed that George W. Bush was “toast” after he was overtaken in the polls by Al Gore: “Now that he has passed Bush, the race is over.” In 2004, acclaimed pollster John Zogby predicted on Election Day that John Kerry would score a comfortable victory over Bush with 311 electoral votes. Kerry turned out to be the only Democrat so far in the 21st century to lose both the popular vote and the Electoral College. In 2008, while estimates of Barack Obama’s general election victory were mostly accurate, Zogby was embarrassed again in the critical New Hampshire Democratic Party primary, predicting that Obama would prevail over Mrs. Clinton by 13 points. He lost by almost three points. As The Hill put it in a comprehensive piece on blown predictions, it seemed to signal that the primary misfire that year was caused by “completing surveys too soon to detect late-campaign shifts in voters’ preferences.”
In 2012, which The Hill rightly termed “a banner year for failed predictions,” many right-leaning pundits were dead wrong about the race between Obama and Mitt Romney. Peggy Noonan, author and acclaimed speechwriter for Ronald Reagan, cited vibes and lawn signs in writing that “All the vibrations are right” for a Romney presidency. Famed political operative Karl Rove wrote that “after the cock crows in the morning [after Election Day] Mitt Romney will be declared America’s 45th president.” predicting that the GOP standard-bearer would win “at least 279 electoral votes, probably more.” Respected analyst and number-cruncher Michael Barone predicted Romney would win 315 votes. He won just 206.
In 2016, almost every model for the race had Mrs. Clinton on a glide path to victory. She was given more than a 90% chance of winning by the likes of the Princeton Election Consortium and, most famously, by left-wing election “guru” Nate Silver. And we all know how wrong they were. In 2020, dubbed by The Hill as “polling’s worst overall performance in 40 years,” the most famous among the many overheated predictions of a Biden landslide was on CNN, which reported in October that Joe Biden had opened up a lead of 16 points over Trump, and later that month, forecast a 12-point margin. Trump lost by just over four points.
Polls and Predictions: Art or Science?
Polling is both an art and an inexact science. Several determinative factors are almost impossible to predict: voter turnout (massive in 2020); undecided voters breaking heavily in one direction at the 11th hour; last-minute changes of heart in the voting booth or events in the waning days of a campaign that the polls are unable to incorporate into their surveys and analysis. Such was the case in 1980 when a race widely considered a toss-up as late as October turned into an overwhelming victory for Ronald Reagan after his single debate with incumbent Jimmy Carter just days before the election.
Liberty Nation News has written at length about the 2024 presidential election, reporting regularly (and now daily) on everything from whether the neck-and-neck nature of Trump vs Harris polling is actually predictive to the possibility of a landslide. Given their built-in advantage in the Electoral College, Republicans are unconcerned with, and all but expect to lose, the popular vote. It is the new paradigm of the Trump years – huge deep-blue states, California and New York, running up the score in the popular vote by rejecting Trump in massive numbers, smaller red states embracing him, and medium-sized states with lighter shades of blue and red determining the outcome.
Like every election other than foreseeable landslide victories by Richard Nixon in 1972, Reagan in 1984, and arguably Obama in 2008, predictions based on vibes, lawn signs, the opinions of respected analysts, or even extensive polling, are all fraught with peril. What will be the outcome this year once all the votes are tabulated? Don’t count on pollsters and pundits to provide the answer.
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