“Herd mentality” may not bring an end to coronavirus, despite President Trump’s slip of the tongue, but the phenomenon is never more real than during election season. In the bubble of opinion pollsters, pundits and the commentariat, a conventional wisdom usually forms about what is going to happen — and it is often wrong. The trauma of the shock Trump victory in 2016, missed by most of the media and pollsters, looms large.
So what is the evidence about who is going to win in seven weeks’ time? Which way is the “herd” really facing? Currently the national polls show Biden ahead by 6-8 points; in the battleground states that will decide the election it’s closer, but he’s still solidly ahead. There’s a lot that can still happen, but in the coming weeks are the polls and media narrative more likely to be underplaying, or overplaying the chances of a Trump re-election? To find out, I spoke to some of the world’s leading experts — including one notable dissenting voice.
Watch the full interview below
Nate Silver runs FiveThirtyEight, perhaps the most famous polling website in the world; he faced a good deal of criticism after his 2016 eve-of-election model gave Hillary a 71.4% chance of winning the election (he’s keen to point out that this was lower than many other models — the New York Times had her at 85%, others at 99%). Right now, FiveThirtyEight gives Trump a 24% chance of winning, and Biden is at 76%.
“It’s a weird election because it’s a little hard to diagnose exactly what the conventional wisdom is,” he tells me. “There’s a meme that everybody is overconfident on Biden, but in fact… people are quite cautious on Biden.”
“If you go to betting markets, they have Biden as only about a 55% favourite. To me that seems hard to justify, low on Biden. He is up by 9 points — he does have disadvantages like the electoral college but I don’t think that quite computes… When our model was released, everyone kind of nodded and said, ‘70% seems about right to me’ … So for better or worse, our forecast and the conventional wisdom are aligned.”
But not everyone in Washington sees it that way. Republicans tend to think that the conventional wisdom is, once again, under-rating the chances of a Trump victory. The pollster-of-choice for this view is Robert Cahaly of Trafalgar Group. He may be a contrarian voice, but he deserves to be taken seriously: he was one of the few in 2016 to correctly call the crucial Trump wins in Michigan and Pennsylvania. His polls show Trump narrowly ahead, and winning enough of the battleground states to secure a victory in November.
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