America's Most Powerful Pollster Has Some Doubts

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

63% : (Our conversation took place hours before Donald Trump was found guilty on 34 charges, which, Cohn later wrote, could provide a boost for Biden among key voters he's been struggling with.)
61% : Most polls, including yours, have Trump currently leading in the important swing states.
59% : Abortion and democracy have worked very well for Democratic candidates in the last two to four years.
59% : In polling, when you can't come up with a strong theory to explain what went wrong, you usually fall back on this diagnosis of exclusion -- non-response bias.
57% : And frankly, if Trump is up double digits in the final month of this race, he's probably going to win.
56% : I don't know whether, if we have an absolutely perfect poll, like literal truth for a moment and we could basically conduct an election today, or simulate an election -- I don't know Donald Trump would be ahead or behind in the three Midwestern battleground sites, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, that are reasonably close in our polling.
52% : And other people support the Democrats out of perceived self-interest -- they might think that Democrats are going to protect their Medicare and Social Security, or that they're good for working people, and so on.
51% : What's changed, to my mind, is that Joe Biden went from being a broadly appealing person -- they didn't necessarily love him, they didn't necessarily even like him, but he was acceptable -- to someone who many voters do not find acceptable anymore.
49% : We thought that undecided voters were prone to switching, and there was real evidence that you could look at after the election that suggested that this could explain why most of why the polls underestimated Donald Trump, and therefore, why we could be pretty confident that we could do well in the future, provided that we represented people without a college degree in the numbers that we wish we had.
41% : One interesting thing I could note in this respect is that our polls right now show Donald Trump doing really well among disengaged voters.
40% : Last week, I spoke with Cohn about the unusual elements of the Biden vs. Trump 2024 rematch, why we still don't know what went wrong with 2020 polling, and whether the New York Times covers their own polls appropriately.
38% : Is it possible that Trump was similarly strong among these voters in 2020, and that's who we were missing?
35% : Donald Trump in 2020 and 2016, was seen as the best candidate on the economy, and now that issue matters much more for voters, because they say the economy is bad.
34% : Not only is it that Trump supporters are less likely to respond to surveys than Biden supporters, but they're overwhelmingly concentrated among the kinds of people who don't show up in midterm elections.
34% : Economics coverage solves this problem through survey research.
33% : But we're seeing that state Democratic candidates are outrunning Biden right now, which also ties into the theory that is really just about the president, and less about Trump.
26% : There's this idea that if everything we did looks right, but we didn't get the answer we wish we did, there must be some reason why the people who backed Donald Trump were still underrepresented in our surveys, and it was probably just that they're less likely to respond than demographically similar Biden voters.
25% : They're more likely to want a candidate who supports change, just because they're not happy with the status quo, and they're not going to make the rational calculation that, "Oh, I'm not happy, but I think Donald Trump is a threat to democracy, and therefore, I'll vote for Joe Biden, even though I don't like him."
24% : For example, in November 2023, NYT/Siena polls that found President Biden trailing Donald Trump in several swing states set off a (familiar) cycle of Democratic anxiety and recriminations about Biden's prospects that continues to the present moment.
22% : And it's worth noting that we know that the people who didn't vote in recent elections, almost by definition, are not the ones who were motivated to stop Donald Trump last time.
20% : So what changed?Donald Trump has never been popular.
18% : This group of disengaged voters doesn't like Donald Trump, and never did.
18% : After 2016, there was no shortage of plausible explanations for why the polls had underestimated Donald Trump, which were backed by hard evidence.
15% : And Biden is trying to still win those voters on a pretty sophisticated argument, frankly, about Donald Trump as a threat to democracy and about his opposition to abortion rights.
14% : We've had a lot of well-known candidates like Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump, who aren't unknown like Michael Dukakis was in 1988.
14% : So we know that this is a group of people that just can't be that upset about Donald Trump.
14% : And many of the arguments that Democrats would traditionally make against the Republican, like "Oh, they're going to help the rich and not the working class" are harder to make against Donald Trump than they were against Mitt Romney in 2012.
12% : The polls overestimated Joe Biden nationwide, by about four points on the margin, which is to say the difference between Trump and Biden.
11% : I don't know if it's to say that Donald Trump would make it worse.

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