The polls are wrong again: expecting the unprecedented, and ruling out the amply attested, in a status quo election

By this point, the results of presidential opinion polls reveal more about their own methodology, and the broader climate of opinion that is heavily shaped by the media, than they do about the outcome of the election. I'm not going to micro-analyze any single poll, because the failures are systemic and require the pollsters themselves -- not me -- to inspect each step of their process to locate where all the failures are.

How do we know that the polls are broken? Because their results are off in outer space, with little to no precedent throughout the entire political era we're currently in (the neoliberal / Reagan era, beginning in 1980). If a poll's design, methodology, and execution produce such risible results, then they are in need of one hell of a "de-bugging," to borrow a term from software programming.

Imagine if their result said that "Hillary Clinton, the Republican, will win X percent of the vote in 2020, while Donald Trump, the Democrat, will win 100-X percent." We would dismiss everything that this poll yielded because it is so fundamentally broken that it got the candidates' parties reversed, and even then it thinks that Clinton, not Biden, is the 2020 Dem nominee.

These would not be isolated flukes, like typos, that could be easily corrected and put our worries to rest. They would only be the tip of the iceberg -- the most starkly visible symptoms of a broader underlying syndrome. For example, if the guy coding the candidates' parties was stoned out of his mind, he likely introduced other errors into the process, just ones that will take a finer-grained investigation to root out and correct.

The results of the polls act as a test of the underlying design, methodology, and execution. If it is ridiculous, we don't accept it just because it came from some design and methodology -- it means we should be suspicious of the design and methods that yielded it. To blindly accept whatever any old model generates is to practice cargo-cult science. We would then subject each step of the process to ruthless scrutiny, to be sure that the process generating an extreme result is sound. In all likelihood, it means the process is not sound.

In fairness, maybe it would pass the ruthless inspection, and we are about to experience an extreme result. However, none of the polls yielding these ridiculous results are in fact being subjected to such de-bugging, to fully reassure what ought to be a highly skeptical audience. Instead the results are being accepted at face value -- not that they take any single one to be correct, but that in some aggregate, they are correct. But averaging a bunch of risible results does not make their processes any more sound or reliable. The average of a pile of garbage is still garbage.

What are some of the most flagrant examples of these results? I might add others in the comments as I come across them, but here are the big whoppers.

1. The challenger (Biden) is going to unseat a one-term incumbent (Trump) from the dominant party (GOP) of the era (Reaganism).

This has never happened in our era, and the last time it did was the realignment election that started it all -- Reagan unseating Carter in 1980. The 2020 election is not one of realignment -- indeed, Biden is adamantly campaigning on returning to the status quo ante Trump, who is disjunctive, rather than trying to steal Trump's anti-Reaganite themes from 2016 and promising to deliver on them in a way that Trump himself has been mostly unable to. (Reagan out-Cartered Carter on dismantling the New Deal.)

2. The winner is going to win the popular vote by 9-10 points.

Also has not happened since the realigner Reagan. In '84, he won by nearly 18 points -- but that was a re-election, not his first win, and he was from the dominant party of his era, not the opposition. Plus he was a realigner. None of those conditions is true for Biden in 2020. Reagan also won by nearly 10 points in '80, when he was an opposition-party challenger to a one-term incumbent from the dominant party of the era. So again, this reduces to how analogous 2020 is to 1980 (not at all).

3. The Democrat in the Reagan era will win voters aged 65 and older -- and if the flashy polls are to be believed, by something like 60% to 40%.

Qualitatively, this does have some precedent, albeit 20 years ago or longer: Clinton won them in both '92 and '96, and Gore won them in 2000. But quantitatively, the result is without precedent. Gore only narrowly won them (51% to 47%), and both of Clinton's elections had a major third-party candidate (Perot) who drew more from Republicans than Democrats. Putting Perot voters back to their usual party, Clinton would still have won seniors, but again only narrowly (low 50-something percent range). That is also the typical range for how this age group usually votes in the Reagan era, i.e. Republican (Trump won them 52% to 45%).

Once again, you'd have to go back to realigner Reagan to find seniors voting 60% for either party. Even if Trump did narrowly lose them, that would not prevent a win -- Obama lost them both times and won both times, and Bush lost them in 2000 and still won. The 45-64 age group is more important.

4. Third party vote share will be in the 5-10 point range.

Much of the reason why polls show Biden leading by so much is because there are so many saying they'll vote third party, are unsure, etc. There is some precedent for that in our era: 6% voted third parties in 2016, Perot exceeded that in '92 and '96, and Anderson got over 6% in '80. But we know that's not happening this time because third parties are effectively invisible and inactive, and each major party is far more unified than four years ago.

There's no Jill Stein leading a march of angry Bernie bros and babes outside the DNC, nor a Gary Johnson being constantly platformed by MSNBC to target suburban moderates, nor a McCuckin platformed by CNN to steal Utah (he ended up robbing Trump of Minnesota instead). Most people could not name the Green or Libertarian nominee this time around.

Perhaps 0.5% will go to the Greens, 1% Libertarian, and no more than another 0.5% combined for the others. Most of the supposed non-major party support from polling will wind up in Trump's column on election day: the Libertarians are far more numerous than the Greens, wary right-wingers no longer consider Trump a wild card or beyond the pale, and Republicans are the only ones with an incentive to say "not sure" when polled, since the climate of hysteria and fear makes them, not the Democrats, the evil witches whose homes must be burned down to save humanity.

The parties are more unified than in 2016, but the GOP is more united than the Dems, since there was no contest for the primary on the GOP side (incumbent president), whereas there was a decent contest from the Bernie bros on the Dem side (albeit far less enthusiastic and effective than in 2016). Bitter or disillusioned voters, who make up the target for third parties, will be more common on the Dem rather than GOP side.

5. Battlegrounds: Arizona flipping blue, no Rust Belters remaining red

The current RCP average has Biden up over 3 points in Arizona, a state that has only voted Democrat once in the Reagan era, in '96 -- when there was a big third-party wild card (Perot), and when the Democrat was the first-term incumbent president, neither of which applies today. Rationalizers try to paper over this ridiculous prediction by pointing to Trump's narrower margin there in 2016, compared to Romney's or McCain's performance in the two elections before that. But that was due to "respectable" Republicans chafing at Trump and voting third party -- Clinton got no more of the vote than Obama did either time. Since those wary Republicans are coming home this time, Trump's margin will be closer to McCain's or Romney's than it was last time. Arizona is not a battleground.

On the flipside of the loyal Republican Sun Belt, there was the disaffected Rust Belt that defected from blue to red last time. Current polling averages show none of them remaining red this time. This systemic model failure is the flipside of expecting the unprecedented -- ruling out the amply attested. The Rust Belt voted for Reagan twice, and while Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Iowa voted blue in '88, Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania voted for George Bush Sr. Iowa voted for Bush Jr. during re-election in '04, and Trump is now up for re-election. Not to mention the even more recent history -- namely, the very last election, when Trump swept the region.

The models do not have to predict that Trump is going to sweep the region to the same degree as last time, but ruling out even a single hold (including the purple / swing state of Ohio) is an absurdity. And worse than that, a biased absurdity. These results are not all over the place, some ridiculously pro-Biden and some ridiculously pro-Trump -- they are uniformly in the pro-Democrat direction. They are not predicting Trump to win New Jersey, or to expand his popular vote share by 10 points.

These failures interact with the problem of the third party estimates. On the eve of the last election, polls in the Rust Belt suggested that 5-10% would vote third party. In reality, only half of the estimate actually did, and the other half voted Trump, while hardly any voted Clinton. This kept the estimates of Clinton's share pretty accurate, but then "delivered" Trump a "bump" of several points over his polling. In most states, that was enough to overtake Clinton, although in Minnesota the degree was not enough to win outright (though it was qualitatively the same pattern).

The terms "deliver" and "bump" are in quotes because those people did not actually make up their minds last-minute, or "break for" Trump. They were going to vote for him, but did not want to tell that to the pollsters. Clinton supporters felt no pressure to keep their intentions secret, so they saw no apparent last-minute bump of undecideds in their favor.

This pattern is repeating itself this election: Biden's estimates on the eve of the election will be pretty accurate, but half of the undecideds will be Trump voters and give him an apparent last-minute bump. We're still weeks away from the eve of the election, so the polls will narrow in Trump's favor over that period, just as they did last time. The narrowing in polls, plus the apparent bump, will win Trump at least some of these states again. Regardless of which ones are held, the net effect will be a Trump re-election, although perhaps by a smaller Electoral College margin than last time.

Without going into a whole 'nother post about the causes of these failures, suffice it to say that the media themselves are to blame for the systemic failures of their polling models. They have bombarded the culture with unrelenting hysterical propaganda not only against Trump but against everyone who voted for him, or even sympathized with his campaign. Naturally that will make a lot of his supporters unwilling to respond to the pollster in the first place, or to guard their answer behind a non-committal "third party / don't know" response. They have not only not hammered the same propaganda campaign against Democrat voters, they have sanctified them, so there is no counter-balancing pressure for them to hide their intentions.

Republican elites do not control the informational sectors of society, but the material sectors, and they have not used them to intimidate, demonize, or otherwise pressure the voters of the other side. The military is not withholding national defense, say by waving foreign armies in to freely occupy urban Democrat strongholds. The agriculture cartel is not starving the cities of food shipments. Big oil and big coal are not turning off the power in blue zip codes. And the manufacturing cartel is not withholding cars, clothing, or other products from liberal customers.

And even if they were, the military et al. don't control the polling firms -- why would a hypothetical Democrat who got harmed by GOP elite sectors feel intimidated to reveal his voting preference to the media, which is on the other side of the political spectrum? Maybe they wouldn't want to say they're Democrats if they faced a military checkpoint outside of a voting station, but to a pollster from the mainstream liberal media? They'd feel perfectly fine venting to fellow Democrats.

Because the media, entertainment, and info-tech sectors have only ramped up their psychotic attacks against half the population, do not expect presidential polling to get better anytime soon. Rather, the results will only reveal in what ways and to what degree the polls are systematically broken, due to the climate of hysteria created by those sectors themselves.