
President Donald J. Trump and First Lady Melania Trump attend the 2020 Salute to America event Saturday, July 4, 2020, on the South Lawn of the White House. (Official White House Photo by Andrea Hanks)
At The American Spectator, David Catron explains how hidden polling data is predicting a big Trump win in 2020. He writes (abridged):
“If Trump is behind in the polls, why do most voters say, in the same surveys, that he will win the upcoming election?”
As Harry Enten recently noted at CNN, “An average of recent polls finds that a majority of voters (about 55%) believe that Trump will defeat Biden in the election.
Trump’s edge on this question has remained fairly consistent over time.
”This is far more than mere statistical curiosity by number nerds. Several peer-reviewed studies have shown that surveys of voter expectations are far more predictive of election outcomes than polls of voter intentions.
According to studies conducted by researchers in the United States and in Europe, any pollster attempting to divine the outcome of an election should pay far less attention to what survey respondents say about the candidate they plan to vote for than the candidate they actually believe is going to win. Professor Andreas Graefe of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LSU Munich), proclaims these citizen forecasts, as they are sometimes categorized, “the most accurate method that we have to predict election outcomes.
Few election polls include the dangerous question, “Who do you think will win the upcoming election?”
The pollsters know about the research discussed above, they are familiar with the predictive nature of voter expectation surveys, and they know that including such a deadly query will produce accurate results that will enrage their paymasters.
David Catron is a recovering health care consultant and frequent contributor to The American Spectator.
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