Former President Donald Trump currently leads Vice President Kamala Harris by 0.3% in the RealClearPolitics average of national polls and by an average of 1.1% in the battleground states. Both results are well within the margins of error of the individual polls included in the averages. Although there’s no question that Trump’s poll numbers moved higher throughout the month of October, and he remains marginally better positioned than Harris, the race is still considered to be neck and neck.
We are now four days out from the election and the lack of any clear direction from the polls seems unnatural.
Polling guru Nate Silver has noticed this “sameness” in the polls. In the Thursday edition of the Risky Business podcast, which he co-hosts with Maria Konnikova, he blamed it on the pollsters.
In a discussion about the current state of the race, he told Konnikova, “It’s basically 55-45, Trump. Or 54-45 with a small chance of a tie. It’s been a little weird, I mean, look, it’s gradually drifted to Trump over actually a fairly long period now. Two out of every three days, Harris has lost ground in the forecast since roughly early October.
Then he turned to the polls. “I kind of trust pollsters less because they all, every time a pollster [says] ‘Oh, every state is just plus-one, every single state’s a tie.’ No! You’re f***ing herding! You’re cheating! You’re cheating! Your numbers aren’t all going to come out at exactly one-point leads when you’re sampling 800 people over dozens of surveys.
He continued, “You are lying. You’re putting your f***ing finger on the scale.”
[In a report from his days at data website FiveThirtyEight, Silver defined herding as “the tendency for polls to produce very similar results to other polls, especially toward the end of a campaign. A methodologically inferior pollster may be posting superficially good results by manipulating its polls to match those of the stronger polling firms.]
“I will not name names,” he tells Konnikova, “but some pollsters are really bad.” Silver laughs and then says, “Emerson College.”
Silver complained about “all these GOP-leaning firms” who don’t want to “go too far out on a limb.” They all show Trump up 1 in Pennsylvania.
[I would argue that most left-leaning pollsters show Harris up 1 in Pennsylvania and in many other battleground states as well, but I digress.]
“Every single f***ing time? No, that’s not how f***ing polling works!” he joked. “There’s a margin of f***ing error.”
With the exception of the New York Times, Silver thinks the pollsters are “just f***ing punting on this election for the most part.”
He pointed out, “Some of the other polls will actually publish numbers that surprise you once in a while. If a pollster never publishes any numbers that surprises you, then it has no value.”
“But look, all seven swing states are still polling within it looks like a point and a half here … [or] two points. It doesn’t take a genius to know that if every swing state is a tie, that the overall forecast is a tie.”
In a recent New York Times op-ed, Silver said he is frequently asked by readers what his gut is telling him about the outcome of the race. He wrote, “So OK, I’ll tell you. My gut says Donald Trump. And my guess is that it is true for many anxious Democrats.”
But, he is quick to tell readers he doesn’t think they “should put any value whatsoever on anyone’s gut — including mine.”
“Instead,” he notes, “you should resign yourself to the fact that a 50-50 forecast really does mean 50-50. And you should be open to the possibility that those forecasts are wrong, and that could be the case equally in the direction of Mr. Trump or Ms. Harris.”
In the op-ed, Silver dismisses the idea of the “shy Trump voter” because there’s “not much evidence” to back it up. He sees the problem as “nonresponse bias.” He adds that, “It’s not that Trump voters are lying to pollsters; it’s that in 2016 and 2020, pollsters weren’t reaching enough of them.”
Although few of us are likely surprised by Silver’s remarks about his fellow pollsters, it was interesting to hear an insider’s perspective.
[Note: I have never received a call from a pollster. I would be curious to hear in the comment section if any readers have been contacted by a pollster, by call or text – and if you participated in the survey.]
Elizabeth writes commentary for The Washington Examiner. She is an academy fellow at The Heritage Foundation and a member of the Editorial Board at The Sixteenth Council, a London think tank. Please follow Elizabeth on X or LinkedIn.
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