From the Tuesday Morning Jolt…
The Difficult Art of the Miraculous Comeback
You’re going to hear a lot in the next few weeks about how the polls can be wrong, how the candidate who’s trailing in October can surge ahead on Election Day, and so on. The example most likely to be cited by the supporters of Donald Trump is the presidential race in 1980:
There have been only 2 instances in the past 14 elections, from 1952 to 2004, when the presidential candidate ahead in Gallup polling a week or so before the election did not win the national popular vote: in 2000 (George W. Bush) and 1980 (Jimmy Carter). And in only one of these, in 1980, did the candidate who was behind (Ronald Reagan) pull ahead in both the popular vote and the Electoral College and thus win the election.
Reagan’s late-breaking surge that year is generally attributed to the only presidential debate between Carter and Reagan — held one week before the election, on Oct. 28 — which seemed to move voter preferences in Reagan’s direction, as well as the ongoing Iran hostage crisis, which reached its one-year anniversary on Election Day. After trailing Carter by 8 points among registered voters (and by 3 points among likely voters) right before their debate, Reagan moved into a 3-point lead among likely voters immediately afterward, and he won the Nov. 4 election by 10 points.
There are a ton of differences between the 1980 race and this year’s race, but let’s start with one particularly relevant to this moment: Early voting was much rarer back then. Just 4.3 percent of Americans reported voting absentee, which adds up to roughly 3.7 million people. In 2012, 35 percent of Americans voted early, roughly 46 million Americans.
As of yesterday, October 10, 461,583 people have already voted in the year’s election. That number is going to increase considerably in the coming days and weeks. In other words, if Trump enjoys a dramatic turn of events in early November to his advantage, that will be too late to influence the decision of perhaps one-third of all voters. He needs a dramatic turn to his advantage as quickly as possible.
The other key point is that the Reagan-overtakes-Carter story focuses on that Gallup poll and ignores the rest of the year: Carter didn’t lead Reagan for much of the campaign.
Jimmy Carter’s three-point lead among likely voters in the Gallup poll in late October is better remembered as an outlier than the state of the race for most of 1980. Looking at the RealClearPolitics average, Trump trailed almost the entire year, except for a brief period in late July. Then Hillary Clinton enjoyed a huge bump after the Democratic election in August, but it steadily deflated, and by September, Trump was right on her heels, but still narrowly trailing. Obviously, since the first debate, Trump has had lousy national polls and the NBC News/Wall Street Journal one – conducted after the Friday tape but before Sunday night’s debate – looks disastrous.