The polls were wrong this election cycle. Even more wrong than they seemed to be in 2016. What people like me want to know is: fucking why? How in heaven or hell could the election have been this close?
Who screwed over America?
Let's qualify things first. The polls got it pretty much spot on with Joe Biden's numbers. Real Clear Politics had an average for Biden of 51.2%. The final result was 50.8. That's not bad; only 0.4% off. The real problem, though, comes from the numbers in support of Trump. RCP ended its average with Trump at only 44%, which is pretty much where Trump's approval rating has hovered for four, solid years.
On election day, that somehow spiked up to 47.4%! And because early returns skewed Republican due to Democrats relying on mail-in and absentee balloting, it appeared, for one horrifying night, as though Trump had somehow pulled off a second miracle.
By Wednesday morning, it looked better. Biden took the lead in Wisconsin, then Michigan, and by Thursday, Pennsylvania. The leads he had built in Arizona and Nevada held, and it began to look like it was over for Trump. When Biden took over Trump's lead in Georgia, it was clear it was over.
Something Trump, and his followers, still can't come to grips with.
We should count ourselves lucky that Trump's loss came slowly. If it had come swiftly, Trumpers might have taken to the streets. They already did in Pennsylvania and Arizona, chanting contradictory messages of "Count the vote!" in Arizona, and "Stop the count!" in Pennsylvania. This hypocrisy seems lost on them, but it's fun to point it out, anyway. The slow, slow, grind allowed Trumpers to realize it was over. (For those who could accept it was over. Many still don't accept it. The stark-naked proof of their failure is too much for them to handle.)
Now, over a week later, we are starting to get results on the demographics of the vote, and two things are becoming clear: 1) People either lied to or ignored the pollsters. 2) The pollsters didn't adequately adjust for this.
The polls that got it surprisingly right turned out to be Rasmussen and Trafalgar. Rasmussen has been skewed to the Right for so long that it has been easy to dismiss their numbers as outliers. But they had Biden at 49%, and Trump at 48%. That was a good bit closer to the actual total of 51.2% to 47.4%! Trafalgar didn't have any national numbers, but in swing states, they got the numbers almost exactly right. They called Florida for Trump at 47% for Biden, and 49% for Trump. That was almost exactly right, with the final Florida numbers being 47.8% for Biden and 51.2% for Trump.
Somebody LIED. It was almost as if Trump had a million extra votes stashed away in his sock drawer.
People were clearly supporting Trump in secret. I got a glimpse of this when, on October 28, I received a text-poll which asked the following:
"What best describes your support for President Trump? A) I support him and I need a yard sign and bumper sticker. B) I support him and am willing to volunteer for the campaign. C) I support him but would rather remain anonymous. D) None of these apply to me."
At the time, I re-posted this to Facebook and said, "Really? 'Remain anonymous' is one of the options?! On an official Trump campaign text! Wow! Now that's desperate! For those of you too chicken to support Trump openly, ask yourself why, and change your mind accordingly!"
But in retrospect, this anonymous support was a real thing!
When Robert Cahaly of the Trafalgar group was interviewed on CNN, he came off as a bit of a crackpot, and I didn't take him seriously. But he did say one thing which nagged at the back of my mind, because it made sense. He said that only polls which allowed the respondents to remain anonymous could be accurate, because those who support Trump in secret would not respond otherwise.
I'll be damned. For all Cahaly's questionable methods, he turned out to be exactly right about that.
So who lied? Who DID screw over America?
Well, obviously EVERYONE who dared vote for Trump, who was a candidate who was never worth taking seriously in the first place. I'm still stunned that Trump ever got one, single vote. He was dumber than Bush, more abusive than Weinstein, and, as his tax returns finally showed, poorer than dirt! However, all that aside, some voters inadvertently or intentionally threw off the polls. Who were they? What was the key demographic? What segment of the vote pulled a bait-and-switch on everybody?
I used an article from The Financial Times to help with this. Here's my analysis:
1) SENIORS. Poll after poll showed that Trump was losing big among people 65 or older. It made sense for so many reasons, not the least of which was the fact that many of them were being killed off by Trump's obvious mishandling of the Coronavirus pandemic. People expected that Trump would lose seniors by double-digits. But in the end, the seniors came back around for some strange reason. Trump won seniors 51% to 48%. And while that may be better than how Hillary Clinton did in 2016, when she lost seniors 53% to 44%, it is still not the repudiation that pre-election polls suggested it would be. Maybe they fell for the bullshit Hunter Biden laptop story, or perhaps they have just been conditioned to assume the worst about Democrats for so long that they fell back on old habits. I personally think it's a little bit of both. CERTAINLY, Trump-supporting seniors were among the ones who gave up answering the phone if a pollster called!
Blame quotient: 62%
2) HISPANIC MALES. More than one analyst pointed out that Cuban-Americans in Florida were receptive to Trump's anti-Socialism message. The Republicans successfully equated Biden with Castro (!) and the Democrats just didn't answer that effectively. But nationally, it went deeper. Pure, unbridled machismo favored Trump to the more elderly-seeming Biden, and so many Hispanic males went with the "strong horse." Democrats took the Hispanic vote for granted, assuming that blatantly racist statements about Hispanics being rapists or building a wall to keep Hispanics out would guarantee a a near 100% vote for Biden by the Latinx community. It DIDN'T! Democrats lost Florida, and potentially much, much more! In the future, Democrats are going to have to work harder to win and keep the Hispanic vote! They should follow in the tradition of Teddy Kennedy, who never took their vote for granted, and even sang "Mi Guadalajara" to them in his last campaign.
Blame quotient:10%
3) WHITE WOMEN. Trump lost a little bit of ground with white women in comparison to 2016, but not much. And the polls leading up to the election suggested that Trump was losing white women by a significant margin. Instead, Trump won white women by about 52%. He lost college-educated white women by about 55-45, but won the non-college-educated white female vote 60-40. That still fell shy of the expected blowout the pre-election polls indicated.
Blame quotient: 10%
4) THE AFFLUENT. Trump gained big ground among people who made $100,000.00 per year or more. These were the "boat flotillas," comprised entirely of only those people wealthy enough to afford a fucking boat in the first place (and somehow the "liberal" media missed that point).
Blame quotient: 8%
5) EVANGELICALS. There is really no data regarding Evangelical Christians just yet, and I don't expect Trump gained much ground here, because the Christian media was pulling for Trump from the very beginning - contrary to all of Jesus' principles. But Evangelicals are especially Apocalyptic. They would be the most likely to drop off the grid, ignore their cell phones, and only listen to Christian media. Such people are especially difficult to poll, especially in difficult times.
Blame quotient: 6%
6) AFRICAN-AMERICAN MALES. The Candace Owens effect is real! The pitch made to African Americans, that the cities are "controlled" by Democrats, and that only strong police support can rebuild the inner cities, has had an impact. Trump only won 8% of the black vote in 2016. In 2020, he won only 12%, and that still isn't much, but that's still way better than he did last time! Nearly all Trump's gains came from young, black men.
Blame quotient: 4%
Here's who ISN'T as much to blame this time: White people! Trump actually lost ground with white voters by a few percent. He did still win them as a demographic group, but overall, he didn't do as well with them in 2020 as he did in 2016.
In a way, there is some hope. The surprising number of people who secretly supported Trump also indicates that there were a surprising number of people who were ashamed to be seen supporting Trump. As well they should be! That's not much of a positive, but it's something, at least.
Let's hope it's enough to build upon.
Eric
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