You break it, you own it

Anyone who has seriously studied polling recognises its limitations. It’s a snapshot of public opinion, not a prediction. Bigger samples are better than smaller ones; polls conducted over a shorter period of time are preferable to ones taken over a longer period of time. (Public opinion on breaking news may change from Monday to Friday.) There can be a “shy Tory factor” or people may not be honest about their true voting intentions. People may respond differently to an automated voice than to a live interviewer. Response rates have dropped like a stone. Some households no longer use landlines. Because response rates vary among different demographics, pollsters may adjust their sample to make it more closely resemble the turnout of the electorate.

And then there was Election Night 2016 in the United States, when Hillary Clinton’s thin margin in the polls of Pennsylvania collapsed, her modest lead in the polls in Michigan disappeared, and her bigger lead in the polls in Wisconsin evaporated. States where the polls seemed close, like North Carolina and Florida, ended up being solid-enough Trump wins. Traditional swing states where the polls showed a small lead for Donald Trump broke his way by a much bigger margin. And a few states that Democrats thought were safely in their pocket, like Minnesota and New Hampshire just barely went for Clinton.

What went wrong? No doubt, some people supported Trump but didn’t necessarily want to tell a pollster, and several pollsters realised they didn’t accurately model the turnout among blue-collar whites. African-American turnout was lower than Democrats expected.

And the expectations heading into Election Night 2016 were shaped by a political and media world that wasn’t inclined to rethink its perceptions and assumptions. The conventional wisdom of the 2016 campaign, shaped by media institutions that couldn’t hide their disain for Trump or their strong preference for Clinton, painted the Trump campaign as an out-of-control clown car, with feuding egos, bumbling incompetence, and campaign managers changing as regularly as Spinal Tap drummers. The Clinton campaign, by comparison, was perceived as an experienced, well-funded, well-organised, well-oiled machine brimming with dozens of campaign offices in swing states and a proven ground game.

Signs that Hillary Clinton was a surprisingly weak candidate with an underperforming team became clearer in retrospect. In 2017, the book Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes revealed that Clinton’s campaign was way more dysfunctional than the public knew and that it ignored a lot of ominous indicators in the closing weeks.

Many prominent Democrats and many in the media learned the lessons of 2016 — maybe a little too well. Right now Joe Biden is absolutely crushing Trump in the polls, both nationally and in key swing states. In fact, Biden is looking shockingly competitive in usually GOP-leaning states. He’s consistently ahead in Florida, ahead in the last three polls of Arizona, within a point or two in Iowa, and even within two points in Arkansas.

In the RealClearPolitics average of recent polls — a system designed to overcome any one poll with an odd sample or debatable methodology — Biden leads Trump in the key state of Michigan, 50.3 per cent to 41.7 per cent. The margins are so eye-popping that Democratic lawmakers are telling their supporters not to believe them, fearing that overconfidence could set in.

Biden’s campaign held an online event to launch “Michigan Women for Biden”; and Rep. Debbie Dingell, D-Dearborn, told those watching not to feel confident because of the poll numbers. “Some people say, ‘Oh, look at the numbers.’ I don’t believe these numbers. And look at what’s happened in five months. The world is upside down and not one of us on this phone call would have predicted that the world will be as it is today. And it is five months from now until November.”

The same event featured Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, who added, “I believe we are going to be successful, but we cannot for one second let our guard down. We cannot for one second make an assumption that Michigan is going to go with Joe Biden.”

The growing support for Biden in the polls makes sense — even though he has barely broken through in the news cycle of the past few months, and when he has done, it’s often been for cringe-inducing gaffes like joking that any African-American who isn’t voting for him “ain’t black.”

The US is in rough shape these days. As of this writing, more than 119,000 Americans have died from the coronavirus. The daily number of deaths is thankfully declining, but the rate of new infections is remaining flat and the number of hospitalisations is starting to get worrisome. (The Coronavirus Task Force hasn’t held an on-camera briefing at the White House in more than a month.) The economy, which had been the crown jewel of the Trump presidency, fell hard and far with the quarantines and lockdowns in place, although there are now some good first signs of recovery. The police role in the killing of George Floyd set alight demonstrations, protests, riots, looting, and crimes in American cities. When the electorate thinks the country is on the wrong track, they turn against the incumbent — whether it really is the incumbent’s fault or not.

Some days, it seems as if Trump’s supporters want his reelection more than he does. Trump fans really hate hearing this argument, but there are some signs that Trump has already mentally checked out of the presidency. He rambles about an obscure conspiracy theory about an intern who died in MSNBC host Joe Scarborough’s congressional office decades ago and speculates that a 74-year-old man shoved by police was faking his injuries. On a visit to Pennsylvania, Trump’s aides booked an interview hoping he would talk about the possibility that Biden would ban fracking, a move that would have terrible consequences for jobs in that state. Trump instead talked about how wind power “kills all the birds.” 

As my colleague Ramesh Ponnuru observed, in 2016 Trump managed to regularly focus upon big issues like manufacturing and immigration. On any given day, Trump’s Twitter feed will focus at least once on the latest criticism of him he saw on cable news that he deems unfair. Trump barely talks about getting legislation passed anymore, and there’s considerable evidence that the actual work of governing bores him. Trump enjoys publicly rebuking his cabinet and then is shocked by their disloyalty after they leave on bad terms. He relishes public combat with Democratic lawmakers, but then is left with no way to get anything passed.

Trump will soon return to his usual raucous rallies in arenas, coronavirus be damned, and the man who is an entertainer at heart will be back in his element. But running for a second term as an incumbent is different and arguably harder than running for a first term as a challenger. People can see what Trump has done. He’s a known quantity. If Americans are disappointed with the results of three and a half years of Trump, they have little reason to think Trump will generate better results if given another four years. What you see is what you get.

Could Trump come back between now and November? Sure, but it would be arguably an even more improbable win than his victory in 2016. That victory depended in part upon voters who didn’t like either Trump or Clinton breaking 47 per cent to 30 per cent in favor of Trump. Among those who don’t approve of either Trump or Biden, an early May survey from Morning Consult gave Biden a lead of 46 per cent to 14 per cent.

Just by being the guy who isn’t currently president and who can’t be blamed for the status quo, long time Washington insider and former vice president Joe Biden could well win in November as the candidate of change. As if 2020 wasn’t a crazy enough year as is.