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Every day it’s a new very! Important! Top story! Related to Trump, Hillary and the election — because it doesn’t appear that Trump has threatened anyone’s life or suggested that anyone commit international espionage yet today, the story is that Clinton is ahead in the polls — depending on who you ask, she has a “clear and steady lead”, holds a “commanding lead in Virginia” and “trounces Trump among minority voters;” Trump is described as “badly lagging,” most importantly in high-priority swing states Florida and Virginia.
This is all heartening news for those of us who fear Trump being elected above all else despite any other valid complicated feelings we have about this election. However, you may be wondering (as I was!) how invested you can get in this news — in an election cycle that sees seemingly dozens of contradictory takes per day, each claiming to be equally factual, it’s hard to know what headlines you can get your hopes up about, especially when so much else about this election seems to defy expectations and predictions. So let’s look at what these polling numbers mean and how seriously you can take them.
You may have read this piece from the NYT in June that talks about the problems current polling faces, and why we’re seeing an increase in polls that fail to predict results accurately, like the Republican takeover in the 2014 midterm elections. Essentially, the piece argues, the way that polls have traditionally been run — by pollsters calling random respondents on their landline phones — has been derailed by the ubiquity of cell phones and a decrease in people’s willingness to answer poll questions. This has driven pollsters to explore options on the Internet for survey data, but that presents new problems: namely, the demographics that are primarily reached by online polls don’t match up well with the demographic breakdown of the voting population. On the internet, younger voters are overrepresented and older voters are underrepresented, and it’s very difficult to draw a representative sample. The short version is that it’s increasingly challenging to create polls that have accurate results, which is why we’re seeing less accurate results in some cases.
Does that mean that the polls around the probable Presidential candidate are unreliable? Well, not necessarily. Bloomberg has looked into it:
Polls by themselves can vary widely in quality and reliability, but aggregations of polls including the ones on RealClearPolitics or FiveThirtyEight (which weights results by polls’ previous accuracy and also factors in national polls and endorsements), can help smooth out methodological concerns and small sample sizes and allow trends to emerge… Of the 524 individual poll predictions collected by RealClearPolitics and HuffPost Pollster conducted within one month of a state primary or caucus, 450 of them (86 percent) correctly forecast the eventual winner. When we strip out the two biggest misses for polling this cycle, the Iowa Republican caucuses and the Michigan Democratic primary, where 33 out of 38 poll predictions missed the mark, this increases the overall accuracy rate to 92 percent.
What this means is that while any individual poll can be wrong, and sometimes wrong by a big margin, those big misses are often due to methodological issues with that specific poll (the linked article goes into what happened with the Michigan poll that it discusses above) and not that polling in general is flawed. Flaws in individual polls certainly exist and can cause predictions to be off, but the more polls you look at, the less those small flaws affect the accuracy. So what that means in this case, comfortingly, is that it’s a good thing that polls across the board, with varying methodologies, are all seeing Clinton in the lead and to a fairly similar degree. FiveThirtyEight says that the latest batch of polls we’re seeing are actually “a Trump-leaning bunch” due to “house effect” — polling institutions that have “systematic tendencies… to favor either the Democratic or Republican candidate.” Given that fact, we can actually feel very confident about the veracity of this lead — and if you’re looking at sources that use a model of aggregating a broad range of poll results, you can feel fairly confident that the overall trend you’re looking at is accurate.
Are the polls skewed, though, you may be wondering, or “unskewed?” These are terms that have been flying around over the past couple weeks, with some people claiming that some surveys had uneven respondents or other methodological issues and need to be “unskewed,” because the leads they represent are overblown. This claim, however, does not seem to hold water. FiveThirtyEight traces it back to 2012, when “The main contention… was that the polls had too many Democratic respondents in their samples. Dean Chambers… regularly wrote that the polls were vastly undercounting independents and should have used a higher proportion of Republicans in their samples. But in the end, the polls underestimated President Obama’s margin.” Breitbart has also been arguing that polls showing Clinton in the lead are “skewed,” but when they tried to develop their own poll that they claimed would have more accurate results, “despite their efforts to develop a more Trump friendly survey, according to Breitbart’s poll, Clinton is leading a four-way contest with 42 percent of the vote to Trump’s 37 percent.”
There’s still, it feels, lifetimes to go before November, and it will almost definitely be a very rocky road. But if you’ve been looking for one small thing to feel sure of, that you definitively understand in this confusing hellscape, some slightly heartening poll results can be that for you today. Of course, as this election has shown so far, anything can change and these numbers could be different tomorrow! Most crucially, this doesn’t mean that any of us should stop talking to people around us about how dangerous Trump is as a candidate, or fighting the xenophobia, racism, misogyny and Islamophobia that he’s promoted and will unfortunately persist long after his campaign. Also, though, Trump has announced he’s “not going to pivot” and “Republican leaders [have] sent a letter to the RNC urging them to cut [off] funding to Trump, who many see as a losing proposition with less than three months to go until Election Day.” So there’s that!
Thank god for this! So happy to hear some Republicans saying they’d support Hillary instead.
A thousand times yes to the second-to-last sentence. Also, if this trend continues, it’s also going to be really important to get voters to the polls- there’s a danger in feeling so secure in a Clinton win that people figure it’s a foregone conclusion and don’t bother showing up to vote.
BLESS YOU for answering all the questions being asked by the anxiety loop in my head.
Donald Trump is the only candidate in history running against himself.
THIS!
“Most crucially, this doesn’t mean that any of us should stop talking to people around us about how dangerous Trump is as a candidate, or fighting the xenophobia, racism, misogyny and Islamophobia that he’s promoted and will unfortunately persist long after his campaign.”
So important!
schadenfreude – though I’m trying not to get too excited about his eventual downfall. Oh, lawd. How I long to no longer be forced to hear his name or his idiotic voice in the media.
Hold my hand, Rachel! Trump is scary
Rachel this is excellent journalism ❤️
Thank you for social sciences and stats, and thank you for reminding me to change my address in my voter registration so that I can vote from abroad.
Brexit kind of made me ignore the presidential race and now that I’m resigned to that fate I can think about this one. Thanks for this ^_^
Depending on your state, make sure you also manually request your absentee ballot and vote hella early! (I’m still bitter that Texas never counted my vote for Wendy Davis two years ago and sent me a postcard to let me know that my vote wasn’t counted)
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Look I am not going to go through your entire comment line by line, but a few things stick out as particularly egregious.
“Are you people even aware of what Trump’s immigration policy is???”
Since he changes it all the fucking time, no. I’m not and neither are you. You’re projecting what you would prefer onto a blank slate.
“Trump’s plan is to introduce a screening process for prospective immigrants to the U.S., testing their ideological commitment to western values like women’s rights, gay rights, and religious pluralism.”
Are you sure? Because less than a month ago it sounded quite a bit like his policy would be GEOGRAPHICALLY based, potentially shutting out people who are persecuted for exactly their “ideological commitment to western values” because of where they are from. Which it sounds like you would be strictly against. Today it miiiight be the policy you espouse here but how on earth do you know what it will be tomorrow? Next month? In January 2017? I mean, you couldn’t even throw us a link to back up what you’re saying here.
Not only that, but you appear to be throwing out a lot of unproven assumptions here?
“I doubt they would be outraged if Trump threatened to deport the Westboro Baptist Church.”
Prove it to me.
“The establishment Left, of course, think Orlando was a tragic incident of workplace violence, enabled by toxic masculinity and a lack of gun control.”
Link me a single article that says this.
“Murder 50 fags and injure 50 more and you’re a tragic victim […] whose dad will be invited to stand behind Hillary Clinton at a rally.”
Invited? Prove it.
“As the body counts — and rape counts — in Europe rack up”
Bollocks. I live in Europe. We are at a low ebb historically when it comes to body counts by terrorism. And it sounds like someone has been listening to far-right propaganda about “rape-fugees”, the vast majority of which is baseless.
“Throughout this election cycle, Trump has been attacked as a bigot and a reactionary on immigration. With this new plan, though, he has proven beyond doubt that he’s the only person running for President who can stick up for chicks and queers.”
Stop projecting and try reading the actual GOP platform. It supports the right of parents to send queer children to reparative therapy, it is stringently anti-abortion, and otherwise stunningly anti-LGBT.
“the establishment Left that wants to abandon the protection of gay rights in favor of flooding America”
Look at the numbers and tell me there is a “flood” of any kind entering America.
“The political world has liars everywhere, and you can not believe anything that comes out of any mouth anymore. You have to look at the policies and see what they actually do, and then vote for that policy, rather than vote for a person.”
Thanks for the excellent advice, maybe you should consider following it!
I am feeling semi-optimistic, but let’s be real. We can’t get complacent. Get registered, get busy and GOTV!
This. Please. I’m not able to vote as I’m not yet am American citizen. But if you have this right, please use it!
The problem with Trump falling in the polls is two fold. Firstly, he can claim underdog status, which in his world equates to something like “the system is rigged, so vote for me if the system isn’t treating you right either” – which leads the un-thinking into voting not for a bigoted, ignorant twat, but voting for a ‘victim’ (as incredible as it is to think of ‘Trump’ and ‘victim’ in the same sentence).
Secondly, and more worryingly, if the sometimes voters think Hillary will win (easily) then they don’t need to get out and vote (and make sure she wins) – the fewer people vote, the better for the Republicans.
My prediction is that either Hillary will win in a landslide (because voter turnout is high), or it will be a small tight win for Trump (because few people turned out to vote because they thought Hillary was ‘ahead in the polls’).
Ignore the psychology behind the polls at your peril, people.
NBC CNN etc… polls are over-sampled to give Hillary an edge – Have you ever watch TV on CNN or MSNBC and heard them say something good about Trump?
What positive things has he said/done? He keeps digging himself into his own bullshit filled hole. One idiotic tweet at a time.