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Political Pollsters Don’t Seem To Have Learned Much From The 2016 Disaster For Their Industry.

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While the moniker “fake news” is typically reserved for cable news and some of the more prominent newspapers in America, the term could also be applied to presidential polls. How many pollsters predicted Hillary Clinton would win the 2016 election by a landslide up to and including the day of the actual election?

The “paper of record,” the New York Times, told readers on election day, Nov. 8, 2016, that Hillary Clinton had an 85 percent chance of winning the election. Their prediction was updated on 10:20 PM ET, oblivious to the evening smiles on cable news shows that were curdling into frowns and outright hysteria.

Screenshot from the New York Times web site on Nov. 8, 2016 // Fair Use

Not only were they wrong, but they were also in abject denial over events unfolding before them in real time. The NY Times was in good company as most pollsters got it wrong in 2016, with Rasmussen arguably the most accurate of the bunch.

Have pollsters learned from their mistakes? Or are they about to step in it again in 2020? Judging by some recent polling news, it appears that history may be repeating itself. As the old proverb says, “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”

Several days ago, this headline ran, much to the delight of CNN and MSNBC anchors, “Fox News poll shows Trump losing to Biden, Warren, Sanders and Harris.” That’s it, then, the race is over. The message to Trump supporters is to give up in despair and leave those MAGA hats in the closet.

The fact that this is a Fox News poll should throw cold water on the narrative of Fox being in the tank for President Trump. Fox News didn’t conduct the poll, however, but instead outsourced it to Braun Research Inc as noted in the poll’s methodology.

Opinion polls are only as good as their samples. The Fox News poll surveyed registered voters, unlike Rasmussen, which surveys likely voters. Why is that important? CNN reported that only 55 percent of eligible voters actually voted in 2016. An opinion poll that queries the half of the population that doesn’t even bother to vote will be far less accurate than one surveying those most likely to vote.

The other aspect of sampling is the political proclivities of those being surveyed. For example, if a survey asking about President Trump’s job performance was carried out in a liberal enclave such as Boulder, Berkeley, or Ithaca, his approval numbers would be in single digits at best.

The Fox News poll oversampled Democrats by 8 points, 48 percent of those surveyed identified as Democrats while only 40 percent as Republican. I’m sure the pollsters have a rationale for skewing the sample to the left, perhaps scientific, or else perhaps, to get a result they want.

Most of those polls predicting a Hillary Clinton landslide in 2016 also oversampled Democrats and the results speak for themselves. As a result, many Republicans are distrustful of surveys and either refuse to answer pollster phone calls or else give false answers to skew the results.

What do other polls say? Do they support the Fox News poll or cast doubt on its validity?

Rasmussen’s Daily Presidential Tracking poll, on August 16, showed President Trump 3 percentage points higher than President Obama at the exact same point in his presidency, 46 versus 43 percent total approval. Obama was easily reelected to a second term.

Gallup shows Trump with a 41 percent approval rating, exactly the same as Obama in the third year of his presidency. Interestingly, Ronald Reagan was only at 43 percent approval in the third year of his presidency and won a 49-state landslide reelection. In contrast, George H.W. Bush sat at 71 percent approval in his third year and lost reelection.

This means that opinion polls have limited predictive value. Other metrics, such as the state of the economy, may be more important than random phone calls to registered voters. Record low unemployment, particularly for women, blacks, and Hispanics and a booming economy may be a better predictor for Trump’s reelection prospects.

Despite the media’s pivot from Russian collusion to white supremacy and racism as the latest attack leveled against the President, “50 percent of Latinos support the job Trump is doing” according to a recent Marist poll.

Black support, according to Rasmussen, is hovering around 30 percent. In 2016, Trump only received 8 percent of the black vote. If he doubled or tripled his support within this core Democrat constituency, traditional electoral predictions all fly out the window.

Another Democrat core group is joining the Trump train: “The Log Cabin Republicans, the nation’s largest collective of LGBTQ conservatives, has officially endorsed the re-election of President Donald Trump — after its board of directors voted against endorsing him in 2016.”

Predictit, the “stock market for politics,” reflects not opinion surveys, but the decisions of financial traders putting their money on the line. When asked: “Who will win the 2020 U.S. presidential election?” Predictit investors have Trump at 44 cents compared to the next closest Democrat Elizabeth Warren at 22 cents, Joe Biden at 18 cents, and Bernie Sanders at 9 cents.

Screenshot showing partial results from Predictit as of August 2019 // Fair Use

Liberal governance is losing popularity elsewhere in the world, too. Trump’s twin in looks and policy, Boris Johnson, is the new U.K. Prime Minister. Italy, Brazil, and Hungary have Trump-style leaders. Even our progressive neighbor to the north, Canada, is now trending conservative, falling out of love with their woke, virtue-signaling Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

Lastly, look at crowd sizes, not a metric typically used in gauging political support. Trump draws crowds in an order of magnitude larger than any of the Democrat candidates, as demonstrated last week in New Hampshire.

This is the landscape before the 2020 presidential campaign has even started. Wait until Trump focuses on the eventual Democrat nominee, using his effective nicknames and branding of his opposition.

This time Trump is the incumbent, with four years of political experience under his belt. Last time he was a businessman with no political background, only his energy, enthusiasm, and charisma. Imagine how much more formidable he will be this time around.

If political polls continue to shape rather than to reflect political opinion, they are as likely to be as wildly incorrect in 2020 as they were in 2016.

 

Brian C Joondeph, MD, via americanthinker.com

Even If The Stories Of Socialist Sharks Are Overblown, We Should Still Be Concerned About Attitudes To Capitalism.

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The summer of 2001 was slow in the news business. But that changed over the Fourth of July weekend, when a shark attacked a young boy in Florida. Suddenly, it seemed as if sharks were attacking Americans every day. The news cycle was consumed; experts weighed in on television; tourists canceled their beach vacations. It was dubbed the “ Summer of the Shark,” and wall-to-wall coverage continued for two months — until 9/11, when the shark news ended abruptly.

Here’s the thing: It was all hype. According to the International Shark Attack Files at the Florida Museum of Natural History, there were fewer unprovoked shark attacks in the United States in 2001 (50) than the year before (52), as well as the most recent year on file, 2016 (53).

Forgive my cynicism, but whenever I hear about a scary new crisis, I think about the Summer of the Shark. And that’s happening right about now as I listen to the constant drumbeat of news that young Americans are turning to socialism, which has become the conventional wisdom, especially in conservative media. I say: maybe, and maybe not.

It’s true that young people are more sympathetic to socialism than their elders are. According to Gallup, in 2018, 51 percent of adults ages 18 to 29 had a positive view of socialism vs. 41 percent of 30- to 49-year-olds, 30 percent of 50- to 64-year-olds and 28 percent of people older than that. This shouldn’t be much of a surprise. It’s more or less like observing that Florida has more shark attacks than Maine.

The claim goes further, though: that young people are increasingly turning to socialism. As my American Enterprise Institute colleague Karlyn Bowman has argued, there is little evidence of that. Few polls have asked about views on socialism over the years; those that do find no change. For example, the Gallup survey in 2010 found the percentage among 18- to 29-year-olds with a positive view of socialism was 51 percent, precisely the same then as now.

So, why all the alarms? Because it fits a handy narrative of American political dynamics currently offered up by the media — one that keeps people addicted to political entertainment. “Young Jacobins want the government to take over the means of production” is a lot more interesting to viewers of cable news than “Young people are more progressive than old people, but not more so than usual.” By appealing to fear, it also exempts defenders of capitalism from making the positive case for the system’s merits. Sharks everywhere!

But just because young people aren’t signing up in droves for socialism doesn’t mean they aren’t concerned about the future of the U.S. economic system. A 2015 poll by the Harvard Institute of Politics found that nearly  half of 18- to 29-year-olds believe the American Dream is “dead” for them. That is the real challenge — and a welcome one, because it provides an incentive to discuss the merits and problems of free enterprise as it now functions in the United States.

For those of us who are enthusiastic about market systems, the discussion starts by accurately depicting the voices of people who aren’t. Conservatives often “nutpick” liberal arguments, emphasizing voices that are extremely radical and exotic — those that defend the depraved Maduro regime in Venezuela, for example. That tactic doesn’t work with unaligned observers, who correctly sense that focusing on outliers is meant to discredit, not illuminate. Listen to mainstream voices on the left, and two themes emerge when it comes to economic policy: a concern about alleviating poverty and a desire to increase opportunity for people at the periphery of society.

These are excellent goals, in my view — moral objectives that attracted me philosophically to the free-enterprise system in the first place but that are too often forgotten even by capitalism’s proponents. As I show in a  documentary film released this month, the percentage of the world’s population living in absolute poverty — living on a dollar a day or less, adjusted for inflation — has fallen by four-fifths since the 1970s, with at least 2 billion people having escaped the grip of extreme poverty. At the same time, the under-age-5 child mortality rate has fallen by 58 percent just since 1990, and adult global literacy has risen from 75 percent in 1990 to 86 percent in 2016.

What explains this amazing progress? Globalization, free trade, the proliferation of property rights and the rule of law, and the culture of democratic capitalism spreading around the world. As President Barack Obama, not known as a conservative dogmatist, put it in 2015, the “free market is the greatest producer of wealth in history — it has lifted billions of people out of poverty.”

Some will counter that the free market is not enough, that millions are still left out of capitalism’s bounty (including in the United States) and others are getting rich through exploitation. And they’re right: Too many have been excluded while others have taken unfair advantage. Free enterprise can be distorted by the powerful, whether through corporate cronyism or the complicated web of social advantages protected by the wealthy.

But that fact isn’t an argument to roll capitalism back; it is an argument for sharing its benefits more widely. Are the potential and merit of people at the margins being rewarded? (Answer: Not enough.) Are the wealthy truly being exposed to the creative destruction of markets? (Answer: Not enough.) More mobility is needed, upward from the bottom and, yes, downward from the top.

Further, defenders of free enterprise must acknowledge that markets are not at odds with a social safety net. The goal, in conservative economist Friedrich Hayek’s words, should be to ensure “some minimum of food, shelter, and clothing, sufficient to preserve health and the capacity to work, can be assured to everybody,” and insurance against “those common hazards of life against which, because of their uncertainty, few individuals can make adequate provision.”

The Summer of the Shark was fiction, and the Surge of the Socialist is overblown. However, concerns about the capitalist system are real. This is an opportunity, not a threat.

Photo by Jakob Owens on Unsplash

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