“To the extent that exit polls can be believed, Trump got a thumping 45 percent of Florida’s Latino vote, an 11-point improvement over his 2016 performance. This is squarely because 58 percent of the Sunshine State’s sizeable Cuban American community in the populous Miami-Dade County voted for him, an improvement of four points from last time. This cut Joe Biden’s overall county-wide lead to merely seven points, in contrast to Hillary Clinton’s 30-point one.
Why did Biden lose ground with these groups? One reason is that Trump successfully associated Biden with socialism, and raised the specter that the Democrat would turn America into the countries they’d escaped. In one masterstroke of microtargeting, Trump invited Fabiana Rosales, the wife of an imprisoned Venezuelan opposition leader, to the White House and then used the video with her to woo the community. Meanwhile, Biden took the Latino vote for granted and did little to refute this branding, even as political commentators like Linda Chavez, a conservative who opposed Trump, were sounding the alarm telling him to wake up. Biden could have also done more to point out that Trump had rejected half the asylum petitions of Cubans and Senate Republicans five times in 18 months spurned efforts to extend the Temporary Protected Status for undocumented Venezuelans. If these communities had been more aware of Trump’s record, they might have been less inclined to support him in such numbers. It was missed opportunity on Biden’s part.”
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“By contrast, the states where Latinos came through in decisive numbers for Biden—and against Trump—were Colorado, Nevada, and Arizona. Colorado was an early win for the vice president. Nevada was a squeaker. And Arizona has yet to even be called by The New York Times. In all three, preliminary reports suggest upwards of 70 percent of Hispanics voted for Biden. Why in such large numbers? Because unlike Florida, Hispanics in these states tend to come from Mexico or Central America. And unlike Texas, they tend to be immigrants or first-generation. Hence Trump’s rhetoric and policies directly threatened them, especially in Arizona, which has long been Ground Zero for the restrictionist movement and where Trump’s interior enforcement policies have hit the Hispanic community hard.”
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“Trump had plenty of restrictionist plans ready to go for his second term, he simply chose to de-emphasize them on the stump. Top aide Stephen Miller had already cued up a series of executive orders to further limit grants of asylum, punish and outlaw “sanctuary cities,” expand the travel ban to include more countries, require even more extreme vetting for visa applicants, and impose new limits on work visas. As if that wasn’t ambitious enough, he was also planning to act on a perennial item on the ultra restrictionist wish list by using an executive order to end birthright citizenship, forcing the matter to the Supreme Court.
But he didn’t campaign on those plans. In fact, he barely mentioned them. This was in sharp contrast to his first campaign”
“Yes, the polls correctly predicted that Joe Biden would win the presidency. But they got all kinds of details, and a number of Senate races, badly wrong. FiveThirtyEight’s polling models projected that Biden would win Wisconsin by 8.3 points; with basically all the votes in, he won by a mere 0.63 percent, a miss of more than 7 points. In the Maine Senate race, FiveThirtyEight estimated that Democrat Sara Gideon would beat Republican incumbent Susan Collins by 2 points; Gideon lost by 9 points, an 11-point miss.”
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“The theory is that the kind of people who answer polls are systematically different from the kind of people who refuse to answer polls — and that this has recently begun biasing the polls in a systematic way.
This challenges a core premise of polling, which is that you can use the responses of poll takers to infer the views of the population at large — and that if there are differences between poll takers and non-poll takers, they can be statistically “controlled” for by weighting according to race, education, gender, and so forth. (Weighting increases and decreases the importance of responses from particular groups in a poll to better match their share of the actual population.) If these two groups do differ systematically, that means the results are biased.
The assumption that poll respondents and non-respondents are basically similar, once properly weighted, used to be roughly right — and then, starting in 2016, it became very, very wrong. People who don’t answer polls, Shor argues, tend to have low levels of trust in other people more generally. These low-trust folks used to vote similarly to everyone else. But as of 2016, they don’t: they tend to vote for Republicans.”
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“n 2020, Shor argues that the differences between poll respondents and non-respondents have gotten larger still. In part due to Covid-19 stir-craziness, Democrats, and particularly highly civically engaged Democrats who donate to and volunteer for campaigns, have become likelier to answer polls. It’s something to do when we’re all bored, and it feels civically useful. This biased the polls, Shor argues, in deep ways that even the best polls (including his own) struggled to account for.
Liberal Democrats answered more polls, so the polls overrepresented liberal Democrats and their views (even after weighting), and thus the polls gave Biden and Senate Democrats inflated odds of winning.”
“in 2016: Trump beat his polls by just a few points in just a few states. The presidential polls were, simply, not that off. State-level polling was less accurate, although as editor-in-chief Nate Silver wrote after the election, it was “still within the ‘normal’ range of accuracy.”
That doesn’t mean there weren’t plenty of polling lessons to be gleaned from 2016, though. The importance of education in predicting a person’s political preferences was a big one.”
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“Nearly every pollster we talked to has made some kind of modification since the last general election. Some changes were precipitated by what happened in 2016, while others were driven by the challenges facing the polling industry, such as low response rates to phone calls and the greater cost of high-quality polling.
But one thing came up again and again in our interviews: Pollsters told us they were now weighting their samples by education, because one key takeaway from 2016 was just how important someone’s level of educational attainment was in predicting their vote.”
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“NBC News/Wall Street Journal polls are even weighted by the share of respondents from urban, suburban and rural areas. “This helps to make sure we are fully representing rural Americans,” said Horwitt, adding that it also “removes another factor which can contribute to poll-to-poll variation.”
A number of pollsters have also changed the way they recruit respondents to make sure they are reaching every pocket of the population. Courtney Kennedy, Pew Research Center’s director of survey research, explained that Pew has moved away from conducting polls by live phone calls that use random-digit dialing to reach respondents to an address-based approach in which Pew first gets in touch with respondents by snail mail to recruit them. Horwitt also told us that NBC News/Wall Street Journal no longer uses random-digit dialing; instead, they draw their samples from lists of registered voters, which allows them to “calibrate the mix of respondents between Republicans, independents and Democrats on each survey.”
Pollsters that reach respondents by phone are also relying more on cellphones.”
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“many pollsters are using a combination of approaches to reach the widest slice of voters.”
“In early April, President Donald Trump’s job approval reached 46 percent in FiveThirtyEight’s poll aggregator — its highest level since January 25, 2017, and a 6-point increase since early November. It has since drifted back down to 43 percent. If Trump received any bump from his handling of the coronavirus outbreak, it was unusually small and short-lived.
International comparison is useful here. Leaders in most peer countries saw 10- to 20-point increases in their Morning Consult polling numbers by mid-April compared to a month earlier, when the World Health Organization declared Covid-19 a pandemic. Canada’s Justin Trudeau has seen a 16-point bump; Scott Morrison of Australia a 25-point increase; even the largely unpopular French Prime Minister Emmanuel Macron has seen his job approval rise 10 points.”
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“Democratic and Republican state governors across the US have seen big increases in popularity as well, upward of 15 points in various polls”
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“Why has Trump’s approval bump been so small relative to most other leaders at home and abroad?
One theory is that the Trump administration’s late and botched response to the coronavirus has dragged down the president’s popularity. There’s some data behind this intuition: According to two recent polls, 65 percent of Americans say either that Trump did not take Covid-19 “seriously enough at the beginning” or that he was “too slow to take major steps” to address the situation.
But plenty of other leaders have had huge popularity boosts despite their own flailing responses. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s overall favorability is up 27 points despite criticism for his hesitance to push for more drastic measures early in the crisis. The UK’s Boris Johnson, who came under fire for his government’s infamous “herd immunity” strategy in mid-March, has seen an 18-point bump. Even Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, whose initial response has been viewed as a cautionary tale of what other countries should avoid, saw his administration’s approval rating shoot up from 27 to 71 percent.”
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“it does seem to matter how long that ineffectiveness lasts. A common thread among Cuomo, Johnson, and Conte: Despite fumbling their initial responses to Covid-19, they quickly changed course and began implementing clear, focused public health measures informed by scientific consensus. Voters might forgive an initial display of incompetence in the face of a novel threat if their leaders quickly adapt and steer the ship in the right direction.
Trump, it seems, has not earned much forgiveness. After denying the severity of the outbreak well into March, Trump looked as though he was beginning to change course. But then he reversed once again. He began saying that the cure of social distancing was “worse than the problem itself,” claiming the country would reopen by Easter, and endorsing unproven (and possibly dangerous) therapeutics. Last week, he even suggested that injecting people with bleach might be a potential treatment (seemingly prompting hundreds of calls to poison centers seeking guidance).”
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“There’s been a lot of focus on how the Trump administration was technically and strategically unprepared for this crisis — and that’s true. But there’s also a way in which Trump himself was not temperamentally or ideologically prepared for it either. Trump built his political career atop fracture, conflict, and polarization. But he’s just collided with a crisis that demands solidarity, unity, and mutuality.”
“To progressives, America’s flailing response to the coronavirus pandemic is everything that’s been terrifying about a Donald Trump presidency since his candidacy started gaining steam — dishonesty, disrespect for expertise, lack of focus and attention to detail, all colliding with a genuinely difficult policy problem to create a lethal catastrophe.
It’s sobering, then, to realize that Trump’s approval ratings, while not exactly good, have been steadily rising since mid-March to reach the highest point since the earliest days of his presidency. After an up-and-down associated with the impeachment process followed by the recent decline, he’s now up to about a 45 percent approval rating from around 40 percent at the beginning of November.
But to contextualize this a bit, essentially all incumbent leaders appear to be benefiting from a coronavirus-related bump. Compared to the governors of hard-hit states or the presidents and prime ministers of hard-hit foreign countries, Trump’s bump is actually quite small, amounting to maybe 2 or 3 points. Compare that with foreign leaders like France’s Emmanuel Macron or Germany’s Angela Merkel, who have seen double-digit increases in their approval ratings.
A Siena College poll released Monday showed New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) enjoying a 20-point boost in his approval rating.”