Political Polling in the Age of Trump
Sarah Sajadi
LEXINGTON, KENTUCKY—As the 2020 presidential election quickly approaches, you may be wondering who will come out on top. Will Donald Trump be the first president since George H.W. Bush to only serve one term as President? Will Joe Biden lose against the incumbent candidate? Well, according to FiveThirtyEight, a polling company that runs 40,000 election simulations to find possible outcomes, it isn’t that simple. While Biden is leading, and more scenarios show him winning, the data isn’t enough to write off Trump. In fact, the same organization predicted Hillary Clinton winning in 2016, along with many other pollsters.
Unfortunately, part of Trump’s political persona is his unpredictability, making any projections that involve him more difficult to predict. Elections are not the exception: they’re the rule. Polls being harder to trust when Trump is involved has led to multiple things: when he is ahead in a poll, his supporters and Trump himself argue he will win by a landslide, and when Biden is leading, Trump and his supporters argue that it means nothing.
Clinton was leading every poll before election day, and when the exit polls started favoring Trump, many pollsters and journalists began looking for errors in the exit polls, rather than the original polls. Now, Biden is projected to win, by multiple polls, including FiveThirtyEight.
However, Biden and Clinton are not the same, and that may work in Biden’s favor. Despite how Biden is not perceived by many to be a good option, he is still polling ahead of Trump. So, why? Well, we can start by looking at social media. For example, many members of Gen Z, have taken to apps, such as Tiktok, to share their political beliefs, using hashtags such as #settleforbiden, which went viral with 140.6 million views, as of September 15, 2020. A sound made of Daveed Diggs calling Trump a white supremacist (one of multiple including the snippet from a rap) has also gone viral with over 17,000 videos.
A quick google search will also yield results of “Settle For Biden” yard signs, buttons, and stickers. The same thing goes for signs that read “Any Functioning Adult 2020” or “Vote Blue No Matter Who.” There has been increasing sentiment, as shown above, of no longer voting for who you agree with, but rather voting for the lesser of two evils. While social media is not necessarily an accurate representation of public opinion, it is how younger generations communicate, especially those who will be voting in their first presidential election this year.
So while polls might not be as reliable as they used to be, they may not be as inaccurate as some fear either. Despite polling poorly in public opinion, Biden is far ahead in election simulations and polls. And while both poor public opinion and good polling is unusual, it has happened before, on a cold election day in 2016.