When I first started this Substack, the second Other Person’s Newsletter I subscribed to (the first was
) was , where the former Obama advisor and co-host of Pod Save America Dan Pfeiffer writes with insight and wit about politics and polling. I quoted him in one of my first posts here, (right after my rant against salted caramel—sorry, Alison) titled, “Polling Is Broken”:“When was the last time you answered a call from an unknown number? Almost all polling calls are marked “potential spam” by the iPhone. A few years ago, someone involved in the Obama data team told me that the response rate for our polls dropped 50 percent from 2008 to 2012 and then 50 percent again in 2016. It’s safe to say that Democrats aren’t the ones answering calls from unknown numbers and then spending a considerable amount of time on the phone with strangers.”
I went on to quote the New York Times’ Nate Cohn, who said:
“It’s important to understand just how few people are answering. In the poll we have in the field right now, only 0.4 percent of dials have yielded a completed interview. If you were employed as one of our interviewers at a call center, you would have to dial numbers for two hours to get a single completed interview.”
Finally, in that column from last October, I shared a National Journal story headlined “Horse-Race Polls Are Not Fixable.”
“The entire concept of polling depends on having a set population from which one can take a random sample and get a generally representative snapshot. Pre-election polls have no existing population—the election hasn’t happened yet, and voting isn’t compulsory in the U.S., so we simply don’t have a population of who voted until all the polls have closed on Election Day.”
“We can’t remedy that. The population of voters will never exist prior to the election. Expecting polls to be able to consistently, accurately predict an election is asking more than is statistically and theoretically possible.”
But now, Dan Pfeiffer is concerned about a polling story in the New York Times that’s getting a lot of attention. It may be ruining your day too.
He writes:
I am still processing this poll and will have more to say in the coming days. But I do not want to sugarcoat it. While some of Trump’s gains among Black, Hispanic, and young voters may be hard to believe, numbers like these are broadly consistent with the trendlines in recent polls. This poll shows that not only can Trump win, he might now be a slight favorite to do so. Even if we don’t take the results literally, we should take them very, very seriously.
Maybe—but maybe not.
Let’s go to the cross tabs, as pollsters like to say. Meaning, dig a little deeper beyond the top-line of a horse-race poll.
An analysis piece that the New York Times ran along with the gloom and doom poll includes the salient fact that from 2020 to now, the share of voters who think Joe Biden is too old to be president has risen from 34% to 71%.
It’s often remarked how odd it is that while Donald Trump is only three years younger than Biden, just 39% of voters think he is too old, up from 18% in 2020.
Of course, they didn’t ask if Trump was too stupid.
But the “age question” about Biden is real. I believe that much of President Biden’s slide in the polls has to do with his age. He walks like an old man. He fumfers around in front of a microphone. He looks frail.
As Dan Pfeiffer reminds us, Biden’s policies are popular and his achievements are real. But when the argument comes down to a horse race, age takes its toll. Pfeiffer writes about “double haters,” who disapprove of both Trump and Biden.
There are a myriad of reasons why these “Double Haters” could be down on Biden — there are Republicans who voted for Biden out of anti-Trump animus, Independents angry about inflation and the border, and younger progressives who disagree with the President’s approach to the crisis in the Middle East. Messaging to such a complex and contradictory group seems like a nearly impossible task. However, a new poll from Navigator Research shows that turning the “Double Haters” into Biden voters is feasible.
Perhaps the simplest explanation of Biden’s political challenges is that he has done a lot of good, popular things, and almost no one knows about them.
His solution? “Let’s work to educate people about everything Biden has done to grow the economy, create jobs, and lower costs.”
Over on Political Wire, (where I agree with Chuck Todd),
makes a similar case, quoting that same Navigator Poll (somebody give that PR firm a bonus!):There’s also a lot more Biden could do to make himself look more appealing.
For instance, Biden has passed a bipartisan infrastructure law, allowed Medicare to negotiate for lower drug costs and led numerous efforts to create more manufacturing jobs.
A new Navigator Research poll finds these initiatives enormously popular. In fact, every one of his accomplishments tested in this poll had majority support. That’s an incredible accomplishment in a bitterly divided country.
I’m sorry, but every campaign and candidate gets criticized for failures to communicate. Working to “educate” voters about Biden’s accomplishments isn’t going to make him walk better.
That’s what’s showing up in the polls. People look at President Biden and see an old man—but so what? That’s what we’ve got, and as that Navigator poll tells us, people generally like what the old man is doing.
If we accept the premise that polling is, if not broken, at least reliably unreliable, perhaps we might temper our panic with some logic and common sense.
I’ll repeat a theme I've raised here before:
If you assume that by the time voters go to the polls next November, Donald Trump will be a convicted felon awaiting sentencing, pursuing appeals, or still on trial somewhere, do you really think he’s going to get more votes in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin than he did in 2020?
If Trump had been charged with murder—ok, just negligent homicide—instead of criminal conspiracy, violations of the Espionage Act and other crimes that carry 20-year prison sentences, do you think he could still win?
Try to answer these questions without letting the words “because he’s Trump” overpower your native intelligence, common sense, and logic. Show me the suburbs where Donald Trump is picking up votes.
In the meantime,