The story of Donald Trump’s underground landslide is not serious analysis — it is wishful thinking for fun and profit.
The story of Donald Trump’s underground landslide is not serious analysis — it is wishful thinking for fun and profit.
M aybe all the polls are wrong and all the news is fake.
But probably not.
With President Donald Trump behind — and falling — in both the national and swing-state polls, many conservative media figures are predicting . . . a Trump landslide. This wish-casting is based on increasingly imaginative reading of the political terrain: Comedian Jimmy Failla of Fox News, for example, called a Trump “lawnslide” based on — hold your breath, now — an informal poll of truckers who were giving their estimates of the ratio of Trump yard signs to Joe Biden yard signs.
Well.
Representative David Rouzer (R., N.C.) is on record predicting Trump’s reelection “in a landslide.” Charlie Kirk of Turning Point makes the preposterous argument that Trump will be carried to victory by the “unbelievable enthusiasm” for him among young people. “Joe Biden is really struggling with younger voters,” Kirk says — never mind that Biden’s lead among young likely voters is 33 points. Jeanine Pirro of Fox News insists that the recent anti-police protests and riots “ensure President Trump’s reelection.” Ensure is a pretty strong word. “Trump Will Win Again in 2020” predicts the very confident Townhall headline over a Bruce Eberle column. Trump’s trouble in the swing states? “Baloney,” Eberle declares. Leo Terrell, who is the ideal Fox News guest — a black former Democrat for Trump — promises that Trump will “win in November — I guarantee it.” Star Parker insists with complete assurance that Democrats are “setting up Donald Trump for a landslide.” How big a landslide? “He may even get the only state that Ronald Reagan didn’t get.” If Star Parker wants to bet on a 50-state landslide for Donald Trump, I’ll take that action.
Paul Gottfried in the American Conservative: “Could the Polls Be Hiding a Trump Landslide?”
Yes, they could be.
But they probably aren’t. Strange things happen, and “statistically unlikely” is not a synonym for “impossible.” But the story of Donald Trump’s underground landslide is not serious analysis — it is wishful thinking for fun and profit.
One of the deathless myths of the 2016 election is that the polls were wildly off. They weren’t, neither at the national level nor at the state level, though the national polls were a little closer to the final tally than the state polls were, as historically has been the case. In fact, the national polls in 2016 were slightly more accurate than they were in 2012. The difference is that in 2012 the polls understated the vote for the candidate who was expected to win and did, while in 2016 they understated, by a slightly smaller margin, the performance of the candidate who was expected to lose but didn’t. But from a polling point of view, a five-point error is a five-point error; the fact that one error produces the right “call” is, as a technical polling matter, not especially important.
Trump outperformed his polls in a few key states in 2016, but not in a way that was out of character with the traditional accuracy of presidential polling. The state polls in 2016 were off by an average of 5.2 percent, well within their historical averages. (The big polling outlier is 1980, when the state polls were off by an average of 8.6 percent.) The national polls in 2016 were off by an average of 3.1 percent, a better performance than in 2012, 2000, 1996, 1992, 1988, 1984, or 1980. As Nate Silver writes, “On average since 1972, polls in the final 21 days of presidential elections have missed the actual margins in those races by 4.6 percentage points.”
That average error leaves a little room for hope for Trump in Florida, North Carolina, and Arizona. Biden leads in all those states, but his lead is less than the average error. But Biden also leads in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin: by 6.3 points, 5.2 points, and 6.6 points, respectively. Believing that the polls in those states have the wrong man ahead requires believing not only that they are all wrong but also that they are all wrong by a larger error than was typical in 2016 or most other years — not impossible, but not likely, either. And that is why the fruitier Trump partisans are relying on call-in trucker yard-sign polls or simply recruiting “the American people” and “the silent majority” to their cause without much evidence.
Some of this is honest stupidity, but most of it is careerism. Pouring scorn on the polls and on unwelcome news reports, predicting a Trump landslide with very little hard evidence to back up that wishful thinking, and, above all, reassuring conservatives that our ideas are more popular than they actually are, that the vast majority of Americans are on our side even if they don’t seem to know it, is a good way to build audience share and a social-media following. And if — as is likely though not certain — this is revealed on Election Day as a fraud and a fantasy, then you can always complain that the election was rigged and that the Deep State has done you wrong. Those doggie vitamins aren’t going to sell themselves.
Maybe I will be surprised — again — on Election Day. But that would not mean that the bull peddled by the entertainment wing of the conservative movement in the closing days of the campaign wasn’t bull. Some people win the lottery, but that doesn’t make buying a lottery ticket a good investment strategy.
And if conservatives expecting a Trump landslide find themselves grumbling disconsolately into their oatmeal on the morning of November 4, then they might ask themselves why so many of their most influential media figures lied to them, what was gained by those lies, and what was lost by them.