Donald Trump has generally been leading Joe Biden in recent polls of how you would vote if an election were held today. How much does this tell us about their prospects for the actual election? Questions about how you would vote in a hypothetical election go back to the early days of survey research, so we have a pretty long historical record to go on. I collected questions from the November one year before the election that involved the eventual nominees. I found them for most elections starting in 1944. In 1952, 1968, 1976, 1988, and 1992, there were no surveys that asked about the actual matchup. I also excluded 1972, when all surveys that asked about Nixon and McGovern also included George Wallace as a third party candidate, and 1964, when a survey taken just a few days after the Kennedy assassination showed Johnson with a 79%-15% lead over Goldwater. That left thirteen elections. The figure shows the Democratic lead in the election and in polls taken the previous November:
There is clearly a relationship: if you regress the election lead on the poll lead, the estimate is about 0.5, and the estimate for the intercept is near zero. So for the purposes of prediction, you should cut the current lead in half. The standard error is about 6. So while it's obviously better to be ahead than to be behind, a small lead at this point doesn't tell you much.
The largest residual is for 1980, when Jimmy Carter had a 10-point lead in a November 1979 poll, but lost badly in the election. The major reason for this was probably that 1980 was a bad year in terms of both the domestic economy and foreign affairs. Another factor is that John Anderson entered the race as an independent candidate, and probably took more votes from Carter than from Reagan. The next biggest residual is in 1984, when Reagan led Mondale by 53%-36% in November 1983 (an average of three surveys), and won by an even bigger margin in 1984. The economy was improving in 1984, and relations with the Soviet Union improved after Gorbachev came to power. These two cases are obviously relevant to the current situation, although given increased partisanship the potential for change might be smaller.
The third largest residual is 2000--George W. Bush had a 14-point lead (54-40) in November 1999--and there were five surveys, which all were pretty consistent. There were no dramatic developments in the economy or foreign affairs, so what happened to eliminate Bush's lead? This is just speculation, but as I recall, Bush had very good press early on. This was partly because reporters seemed to like him and admire his efficient campaign, but also because they seemed to think that "compassionate conservatism" was an idea whose time had come. I don't mean that they supported it--most reporters were liberals--but they believed that Bush was in tune with voters. So my thought is that Bush's early lead reflected favorable media coverage, and that as people got to know him better, they didn't like him as much. This isn't directly relevant to 2024, since voters already know both Trump and Biden. But Trump was barred from Twitter in January 2021, and Truth Social doesn't have nearly as large an audience, so to some extent voters will be rediscovering him as they start paying attention to the campaign. My impression based on perusal of Truth Social is that Trump has become less effective as a communicator: he goes on at length about he's being unfairly persecuted and how people love him (e. g., a series of posts about his rapturous reception at a UFC event). On any other topic, even attacking the other Republican candidates, it seems like he's just going through the motions. So it's possible that he'll lose ground as voters get more exposure to the new Trump.
[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]
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