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What Scares Pollsters This Halloween
Will the Curse of 2016 mean another surprise win for Donald Trump?
The Curse of 2016
By every usual metric, we are being told by respected members of press on an hourly basis, former Vice President Joe Biden is right on-track to win the election in two-weeks time.
Joe Biden is up in the polls- way up, according to some polling authorities. Biden’s commanding lead over Trump has climbed well into the double-digits, if the rosiest Biden polling is reflective of who actually votes between now and Election Day.
The Biden campaign, and the Democratic Party- thanks in part to a tsunami of donations to Black Lives Matter-affiliated organizations and Act Blue, which have been channeled towards electing Joe Biden and other Democratic candidates- is sitting on a massive mountain of cash.
Having finally caught the Trump fundraising machine, Democrats and Democratic analysts are feeling more confident than ever. There are rumors of a coming blue wave, one that will sweep all Republicans before it and install large Democratic Party majorities in both the Senate and the House of Representatives.
And, at the conclusion of voting on Election Day, we are told, Joe Biden will sit proudly atop the dream he has been chasing since long before his failed runs for the Oval Office in 1988, 2008, and 2015.
In spite of all this good news, pollsters are worried. After 2016, they have every reason to be.
It is the “known unknowns”, among other concerns.
“There are more known unknowns than we’ve ever had at any point. The instruments we have to gauge this race, the polling, our predictive models…the problem is all those tools are built around quote-unquote normal elections. And this is anything but a normal election.” — Tom Bonier, CEO of Target Smart
Bonier is hardly alone. The known-unknowns of this election are keeping plenty of pollsters up at night.
“This is a perennial difficulty for pollsters and survey researchers, which the pandemic is making even thornier,” according to Kabir Khanna of CBS News.
Doug Schwartz of Quinnipiac agrees: “With the coronavirus, there may be voters who tell pollsters…