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United States election
The silence of Trump’s voters: why the polls were wrong again
Not everyone wanted to be immediately recognized as a Trump supporter in the election; this man does.
© Mario Tama / Getty Images
Once again, pollsters were wrong in predicting the results of the American elections. One of the reasons for this is Donald Trump himself. With his agitation against the media and the institutions, he has made his voters virtually inaccessible to the polls.
Just over a week after the US elections, votes are still counted in individual states. However, one thing can already be said with certainty: the polls, as in 2016, were wrong. With the difference that demographers and polling stations should have known better this time.
Forecasts less accurate than four years ago
But didn’t the big polls predict Joe Biden’s electoral victory? Yes, and therein lies the problem. As in 2016, the forecasts had predicted a huge victory for Democrats and underestimated Trump supporters.
According to the New York Times, national polls were even less accurate than four years ago. At the time, Hillary Clinton, with four predicted points, was close to her eventual 2.1-point victory with an absolute majority. This year, Biden is expected to win the national vote by about five percentage points. Yet all the major polls, such as “NY Times / Siena College” or “CNN / SSRS,” had seen him win at least eight percent ahead of Trump.
So how is it possible that the forecasts are so wrong again?
Trump voters were not reached
After the 2016 election, there was discussion about Trump’s so-called timid voters, those who do not openly admit that they are voting for him. This year, however, the key to the truth about the polling mess lies in the question of definition, as well as the incumbent president himself.
“Fake Polls” and “Lamestream Media”: In his four years in office, Donald Trump never missed an opportunity to attack the media and forecasts. Therefore, it is not surprising that skepticism of their supporters towards political institutions has increased and that they have participated less or not in the polls.
“We have to get serious about another version of the Shy Trump hypothesis this time,” Patrick Ruffini, Republican pollster for Echelon Insights, told the NY Times. According to Ruffini, one of the problems is that “the polls just don’t reach much of Trump’s base, leading them to underestimate Republicans across the board.”
Corona pandemic shifted focus to Democrats
Another possibility is that the polls for Trump only got worse this year, more precisely with the start of the crown crisis. Democratic pollster David Shor suspects that Lockdown Democrats participated in the polls because they were locked up at home and had nothing else to do. Shor told the NY Times that the inaccuracies in the election forecasts could be explained by the increase in response rates, that is, the willingness to participate in polls, among Democrats since the beginning of the pandemic.
The evidence speaks in favor of this theory: According to the “NY Times,” pollsters reported a huge increase in this provision. The forecasts also showed that Biden’s popularity in crown hot spots was increasing, confirming the assumption that the pandemic was more likely to have hurt Trump in polls. However, the studies did not show changes in voters’ attitudes in risk areas. Rather, the tendency of Biden supporters to respond to polls has changed.
Trump’s popularity among Latinos has been underestimated
In Florida in particular, this year’s polls were significantly worse than in 2016. Contrary to all predictions, Donald Trump mobilized significantly more Latino voters and won a good three percentage points ahead of Biden. But Trump was not only able to score points with Latinos in the Sunshine State: from the more rural Imperial Valley to the border cities along the Rio Grande to the more urban cities of Houston or Philadelphia, Trump won significantly more Latino votes .
Many national polls do not publish results for Latino voters because they generally only include a small sample of the group. However, that could be the problem. Looking at the results of the Florida elections, it is clear that national polls underestimated Trump’s popularity among Latino voters.
The wave of political activism that swept the United States in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests could have weighed on the predictions as well. Many studies have shown that politically active voters are more likely to participate in political polls, and the increase in incidents of racially motivated police violence this year has led to increased political engagement from the political left.
Record voter turnout could also have skewed the forecasts. However, since not all states have been counted, it will take some time before the most important polls can be compared to the final election results. The truth, however, is that most of this year’s forecasts have recovered little confidence.
Other sources: “New York Times”, “The Washington Post”
