A small polling firm has attempted to reveal how major polls in the runup to the 2020 election got it so wrong.
While most national polls appeared to show Joe Biden with a commanding lead over Donald Trump going into Election Day, the results from Tuesday night were anything but, with Biden winning by the slimmest of margins in some states and Trump winning outright in others.
Robert Cahaly of The Trafalgar Group has long suggested that Trump’s prospects were being understated and cautioned that ‘shy’ Trump voters might not be telling the whole truth to other pollsters.
Robert Cahaly of The Trafalgar Group suggests ‘hidden’ Trump voters skewed the results and the outcome of pre-election polls
Cahaly said he believed the polling industry misjudged this year’s election results the same way it did in 2016
Speaking on Fox News on Wednesday night Cahaly said other polling companies have failed to adjust their methodology and account for the increase in the number of ‘shy’ Trump voters – an increasing unwillingness of the public to declare their support for conservative candidates.
‘They have not adjusted. They talked about how they adjusted the model but they didn’t. People don’t want to give their information out — they are hesitant to say how they feel,’ Cahaly said on Fox.
‘When people are shamed for their political opinions, people play the cards close to their chest. You have to figure out a way around that to get trust. They said they adjusted. But we saw in Florida in 2018 they got it all wrong. I was not surprised.
The Trafalgar Group is one of the only nonpartisan outlets that correctly predicted a Republican victory in 2016 after finding that Trump was leading in the key battleground states of Michigan and Pennsylvania.
‘In 2016, the worst being said about Trump voters is that they were ‘deplorable. 2020 is a whole different ballgame. It is worse this time—significantly worse,’ Cahaly said.
‘This year had more things where you can get punished for expressing an opinion outside the mainstream than almost any year I can think of in modern history.
‘I’m finding that people are very hesitant [to share their preference for Trump], because now it’s not just being called ‘deplorable.’
‘It’s people getting beat up for wearing the wrong hat, people getting harassed for having a sticker on their car. People just do not want to say anything.’
Most major national polls showed Joe Biden with a commanding lead over Donald Trump going into Election Day, but a small group of pollsters believe that some GOP voters are ‘shy’
Susquehanna Polling and Research has also promoted the hidden Trump voter theory, as its most recent survey put Trump and Biden neck and neck in Wisconsin and gave the president a four-point lead in Florida.
‘There are a lot of voters out there that don’t want to admit they are voting for a guy that has been called a racist,’ Susquehanna analyst Jim Lee told WFMZ this week.
‘That submerged Trump factor is very real. We have been able to capture it and I’m really disappointed others have not.’
But many pollsters have rejected the idea that Trump voters are hiding, in part by disputing the reliability of Trafalgar’s polling methods.
‘[Trafalgar] doesn’t disclose their “proprietary digital methods” so I can’t really evaluate what they’re doing,’ Jon McHenry, a Republican pollster with North Star Opinion Research, told The Hill.
The Trafalgar Group, one of the only nonpartisan outlets to predict Trump’s win in 2016 released a poll on Sunday which showed Trump with 46.5 percent of the vote compared to Biden’s 44.1 percent. A far closer race than the 10-point lead other polls were predicting
‘They’re far enough out on a limb that a year from now, we’ll all remember if they were very right or very wrong.’
McHenry said he thinks it’s unlikely that Trump voters would lie about their voting plans when approached by pollsters, but acknowledged that data could be skewed if Trump voters are less likely to participate in surveys altogether.
Polls held just before election day this time around gave Joe Biden an average lead of ten points nationally, and narrower leads in swing states, which all-but evaporated on the day itself.
Nationally, Biden was predicted to lead Donald Trump by 52 per cent to 42 per cent, according to polls. In fact, Biden has taken around 51 per cent while Trump has taken 49 per cent, with many ballots still left to be counted.
Among the most inaccurate state polls were an ABC-Washington Post poll that gave Biden a 17-point lead in Wisconsin, a state where he on track to narrowly beat Trump with 49.6 per cent of the vote to 48.9 per cent.
Meanwhile a Quinnipac poll gave Biden a five-point lead over Trump in Florida and four point lead in Ohio. In the end, Trump won both – by three and eight points, respectively.
Iowa was also expected to be a close call, with Trump on 47 per cent and Biden narrowly behind on 46 per cent in the poll. Trump actually took 53 per cent, with Biden on 45 per cent
In the Quinnipiac poll, Texas was predicted to be split evenly between Trump and Biden, but Trump actually took 52 per cent with Biden on 46 per cent
Monday’s Quinnepiac poll (left) also showed Biden leading handily in Ohio, which Trump won
An ABC/Washington Post conducted within the last week gave Biden a 17-point lead in Wisconsin (left), but in reality he was fighting a far closer contest with Trump