Biden is Getting Buried in the Polls

We all know the usual caveats when it comes to political polling: Polls are just a snapshot, not a forecast. Polls have material margins of error. Polls can change. Polls are skewed by the selection of respondents. Most people don’t even participate in polls. And so on.

Most of the criticisms have some validity. Yet, it’s always the loser in the polls who recites them. You never hear the winners complain.

The truth is that polls can be more or less accurate based on the sample. You need about 1,300 respondents in the sample to get highly accurate results. You also need to target likely voters (those who are registered and have voted in recent elections) rather than registered voters or all citizens.

You also need to have a pool that roughly reflects the overall population in terms of sex, race, ethnicity, and party affiliation. When those issues are handled properly, you can get highly accurate and useful results. If they are not, then you may just be getting junk data.

The idea that polls are a changeable snapshot is true, but at some point, in the cycle the snapshot becomes fixed in the voters’ minds (especially on the economy) and the snapshot really is a forecast. That point in the cycle is about now.

So, where is Biden in the polls?

His standing is abysmal.

A recent New York Times poll showed Trump leading in five out of six swing states covered by the poll. (Wisconsin was the only one where Biden was ahead, and that lead was slight). But the news was even worse for Biden.

The poll showed he was losing support in core constituencies, including Black and Hispanic voters and young voters. It’s one thing to lose support among independents. It’s another when core members of your coalition are defecting. That’s what’s happening to Biden.

It’s also the case that polls have historically underestimated Trump support based on oversampling Democrats. If you adjust results by one or two percentage points to compensate for the skew, Trump’s lead gets even bigger. Another critical poll (RealClearPolitics Poll Averages) shows Trump winning seven out of seven swing states.

Trump has a 1.1% lead nationally, a 2.7% lead in a five-way race, and a 3.6% lead in the top battleground states. Perhaps the best way to handicap the race is to use a formula devised by opinion columnist Byron York. He wrote that Trump needs to take the states he took in 2020 (doable), pick-up Arizona (Trump +5.2) and Georgia (Trump +4.6) and then win just one of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania or Michigan.

Put differently, Biden has to run the table on Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan. Trump’s ahead in all three. The race may not be over, but we’re getting close to the home stretch and Trump certainly looks like a winner.

Corporate leaders and institutional fiduciaries looking to incorporate state of the art predictive analytics to their risk mitigation and strategic analysis should click the link to learn more about Raven Predictive Analytics®.