FOR TRUMP, IT’S DÉJÀ VU ALL OVER AGAIN

We’ve all heard the view that the polls showing Joe Biden with a big lead in the presidential race don’t mean much because the polling methodology is badly flawed. There’s a lot of truth in that view.

The polls are flawed by small sample sizes, polling registered voters rather than likely voters, skewed sample selections (polling too many Democrats relative to Republicans), poor turnout models, and many other statistical and methodological defects.

A lot of this is old news. The flaws were there in 2016 and are back again in time for the 2020 presidential election. Good analysts can spot these flaws and reverse engineer the polls to achieve better results. And, there are a few good pollsters out there if you know where to look.

But, is there anything else going on that might cause analysts to doubt the polls and possibly give Trump a better chance of an electoral victory? There is one highly significant error in the polls today that was not as prominent in 2016 and may pave the wave toward a Trump victory.

This has to do with the so-called “shy” Trump voter who supports Donald Trump for President, but either will not talk to pollsters or will not give pollsters a straight answer if they do participate. There are many reasons for the existence of shy Trump voters as described in this article.

Some Trump supporters are rightly concerned that they might be fired from their jobs if anyone becomes aware they support Trump. Others worry about threats of physical violence from Antifa or BLM.

Still others simply do not want to be shunned by friends and neighbors if it became known that they were Trump supporters. If this shy group were small in numbers, their existence would not matter much to the accuracy of the polls or Trump’s change of success in the election.

In fact, the number of shy Trump voters is quite large and could provide the margin of victory for Trump in closely contested battleground states like Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan.

One polling organization called FiveThirtyEight, which was badly wrong in 2016 (they gave Hillary Clinton a 92% probability of victory) said they could find no sign of the shy Trump voters. That’s idiotic because the entire point of being a shy Trump voter is that you show no sign of it.

The comment by FiveThirtyEight shows they are still off-base and using defective methods after four years or trying to fix their polls. The reality is that the shy Trump vote is out there.

They will not make their presence known to pollsters. But, they will make their presence known in the privacy of a voting booth on Election Day.

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