(Dobbs) Ignore The Polls. All That Counts Is The Numbers On Election Day
Harry Truman proved them all wrong.
I don’t disregard election polls. They give us, at the very least, food for thought. If a poll shows your candidate ahead, you can’t help but feel good about it. If it shows your candidate behind, inevitably you’re going to be anxious.
But I don’t let polls, even when they’re discouraging, cost me a moment’s sleep. Not because they’re sometimes wrong, which they are. But because they’re flawed. If there were a perfect way to poll the public, every polling agency would use it. Every pollster would take polls the same way as every other pollster.
But they don’t.
So when it comes to the past week’s polls that spell trouble for Joe Biden’s re-election hopes— which are my hopes— my reaction is somewhere between rational analysis and wishful thinking.
To begin with, we are just short of eight months out from election day. If you account for early voting, whether in-person or by mail-in ballot, it’s still seven months away.
A lot can happen in the next seven months that could turn every poll around. By way of perspective, consider what was happening seven months ago. The headline story was the wildfires raging in Maui. Roughly a hundred people died. The town of Lahaina was leveled.
But if you’re not on Maui, that’s yesterday’s news. Too much has happened since then. Like the war in Gaza. The resignations under fire of Ivy League college presidents. The busloads of immigrants dumped in northern American cities. The birth of a new Speaker of the House. The death of the presidential campaign of Ron DeSantis. The 91 criminal charges against Donald Trump.
If those could happen in the past seven months, how much of equal import could happen in the coming seven months?
Polls are a snapshot in time, but the nation and the world are fluid. The U.S. economy is healthy— inflation is largely tamed, unemployment is near record lows, stocks are flirting with record highs, and interest rates are stable and due to drop. The polls don’t reflect it yet because those aren’t headline stories and it will take some time to sink in. Until it does, we’ll be stuck with polls like the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research survey that came out a few days ago which showed that 57% of Americans think the economy is worse today than it was when Biden took office. But at some point in the next seven months, Americans will see the improvements and the popularity polls for Joe Biden will reflect that. Unless, of course, everything once again goes south.
Meantime, there is no telling where the world is headed.
If Ukraine turns around and puts Russia on the run— which rests right now on the shameless shoulders of pro-Putin Republicans— will Biden get the credit? He’s the one who has seen from the outset that if Russia defeats Ukraine, other American allies might be the next targets in Vladimir Putin’s crosshairs. If Ukraine doesn’t turn things around, will Donald Trump, who has implored his MAGA minions to oppose more aid, take the hit? Likewise, no one can predict the outcome of the war in the Middle East. If it can be contained, will Biden be the hero and get a boost in the polls, or is it too late for that? If it widens, will he be the fall guy?
A few other issues in the next seven months might be the wild cards that turn the polls around. A big majority of Americans support abortion rights while the Republican Party dilutes them, so if the Democrats can do a better job than they’ve done in the past of helping Americans connect the dots, that could be decisive. A big majority of Americans support immigration reform, so if Democrats can hammer home to the American public that it was the Republicans in Congress who torpedoed the most radical immigration reform proposals in decades— which until recently they had supported— that might be decisive too.
And then, there’s Donald Trump himself.
He’s already the first former president in history to be criminally indicted. We don’t know yet how many of his trials will start before election day, let alone whether he’ll actually become the first criminally convicted former president ever. But if he suffers even a single loss in court, more than one poll has shown that most voters in swing states, including Republicans, don’t want a convicted criminal in the White House and would not give him their votes.
It’s worth pointing out, notwithstanding any bump Joe Biden got from his aggressive State of the Union Thursday night, Trump currently has a four-percent lead in the latest presidential polls and that’s what gets the headlines. But he’s not doing nearly so well when you get down into the weeds. In the first three primaries, he ended up beating his opponents, Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley, by smaller percentages than polls had predicted— in South Carolina, he came in eight points lower than those projections. The same thing happened again on Super Tuesday. What’s more, although admittedly it’s just a snapshot, in exit polls in several states, a majority of Haley voters declined to commit to supporting Trump if he’s the nominee. In a Quinnipiac University poll, more than a third of voters who supported Haley in the primaries said flat-out, in November they’ll vote for Biden.
Finally, I hold out the hope that the pollsters themselves will put some balance into their questions to voters. After last week’s New York Times/Siena College poll asked people whether Joe Biden “is just too old to be an effective president” and 47% “strongly agreed,” journalism professor Jeff Jarvis asked on social media, “NY Times, did you ask your random voters whether Trump is too insane, doddering, racist, sexist, criminal, traitorous, hateful to be effective as President?”
That could tip some scales in the other direction.
According to the polls today, some citizens who voted for Donald Trump four years ago won’t vote for him again. And some who voted for Biden four years ago won’t be in his corner again. The question is, how many who have had it with Trump will mark their ballots for Biden instead, and vice versa? As the Washington Post editorial board put it, “The race will be won in eight months by whichever candidate best appeals to voters who don’t like either of them.”
Here’s where the wishful thinking kicks in. Those who have soured on Joe Biden are disappointed with how he has handled issues from immigration to Israel and yes, they’re concerned about his age. But given the stark choice between him and Trump, who is no spring chicken himself, they might hold their noses in November and give their votes to Biden. On the other hand, those who have soured on Trump haven’t changed their minds about his policies, they’ve changed their minds— especially after January 6th— about his character. They’re less likely to be forgiving.
What it might come down to is, like the credo in Hollywood, you’re only as good as your last act. The polls we read today don’t know what that last act will be. So the pollsters can’t ask about it, they can’t predict it. Which is why I won’t lose a moment’s sleep between now and November. All that counts is how the numbers come out on election day.
Three-quarters of a century ago, Harry Truman proved that to be true when he proved the pollsters to be wrong.
Over more than five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He also co-authored a book about the seminal year for baby boomers, called “1969: Are You Still Listening?” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 37-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.
It will boil down to whether there are more sane voters than those who will not see the truth. Yes, all sorts of things can happen in the remaining months before we vote, but I'm optimistic that there are more of us than of them.
I truly fear for our country. The State of the Union address was anything but. I had hoped President Biden would be, well presidential, and speak to the American people about well, the state of the Union, and then tell us where we should be headed.
What I watched was at times an angry candidate running for reelection and trying to show his base he was capable of running. I am glad he appears to be physically capable, but I expected more. Frankly, I don’t need another Democrat version of former President Trump. And Biden’s directly attacking the Supreme Court was, as they say, poor form indeed. Oh well, I guess we wait another four years for someone to bring us together, if with the world boiling around us as it is, we have that much time.
Disappointed in upstate NY.
Eric