Polls have consistently shown former President Donald Trump maintaining a slight lead over President Joe Biden in recent months as the 2024 presidential election draws closer. This is, of course, vaguely encouraging because that lead may evaporate, but according to Nate Cohn, the chief political analyst for The New York Times, there’s “one big flashing warning sign” when it comes to Trump’s polling strength.
Cohn points out that Trump’s lead in the polls is largely due to support from voters who aren’t all that engaged. He’s specifically referring to voters who ignored the 2022 midterm elections, per Raw Story.
“president Biden has actually led the last three times/siena national polls among those who voted in the 2020 election, even as he has trailed among registered voters overall,” Cohn writes. “and looking back over the last few years, almost all of mr. Trump’s gains have come from these less engaged voters.”
Cohn notes this means Biden can’t count on these voters swinging back to him. Reaching these less engaged voters may prove to be a huge challenge because they don’t get their information via traditional media sources such as newspapers and television news.
Even though this is a bit discouraging there is a silver lining, since Cohn says this makes Trump’s current edge in the polls shaky at best.
“While the race has been stable so far, mr. trump’s dependence on disengaged voters makes it easy to imagine how it could quickly become more volatile,” Cohn writes. “as voters tune in over the next six months, there’s a chance that disengaged but traditionally democratic voters could revert to their usual partisan leanings. alternately, many of these disaffected voters might ultimately stay home, which might help mr. Biden.”
But I can’t help but wonder if these less invested voters think that their votes don’t matter. I hear this so many times during election season and it leaves me with questions. Or could there be extremists among some of these voters for whom Trump isn’t racist enough/crazy enough/whatever enough?
Cohn notes that as the splits among less engaged voters stand right now, it makes work increasingly challenging for pollsters.
“while millions of irregular voters will undoubtedly turn out this november, no one knows just how many of them will ultimately show up — let alone exactly which ones will do so,” he writes. “this too is always a challenge for pollsters, but the deep divide between regular and irregular democrats this cycle means that the polls may be unusually sensitive to the ultimate makeup of the electorate, with mr. biden potentially favored if enough of his disengaged defectors stay home.”
I have to admit this is surprising to me. It’s something I haven’t thought of before: That people staying home and not voting could be a good thing. Hmm. I need to chew that one over for a little while.
Who knew there could be a (possible) silver lining to people not voting?
IF these polls are correct, they reflect the huge dis-service the media is performing in it’s task of informing the electorate. And, of course, of the power of dis-information, (lies), promulgated by the right wing of politic’s billionaire backers, always greedy for policies that favor them at the expense of everyone else.
That is, if these polls are correct.
I tend to distrust polls and the msm since both are typically biased. Plus, there can be mistakes in how a poll is conducted and they were all over the map in 2016, 2020, and they may do that again. I do trust what Cohn is saying here because he obviously has lots of experience in this area. That said, the NYT has been famously biased, so all I can say is stay tuned.
Great news considering the polls showed Hillary winning in 2016 right up to the end. Polls…what a crock.
Well, you gotta remember that, in 2016, Trump supporters weren’t as willing to be so “in your face” and publicly supportive of Trump as they are now. They’d heard the “bad stuff” about Trump but they didn’t really care so much about it but they knew if they were asked about supporting Trump, they would be judged for their responses (a fair read, mind you) so they LIED to the pollsters.
The same thing happened back in Colorado in 1992 when voters were asked to vote on an amendment that would overturn gay rights, even to the point of allowing the State to overturn local ordinances and policies designed to treat the LGB community* with full equality and had enacted non-discrimination policies. The last poll before the election showed that the amendment would be voted down (bear in mind, the amendment itself was a “negatively-worded” bill so that a “yes” would be to remove those protections and a “no” would be to keep those protections) by a 60-40 margin. When the final votes were counted, the result was the amendment’s passing by a 55-45 margin. The bill’s opponents were rightly shocked at the results since the polls had shown the bill’s utter defeat. The ONLY thing that could be figured was that poll respondents were generally giving the pollsters the “correct” answer rather than their own actual opinions (the polls, incidentally, had not been limited to just folks in the larger cities but were considered to have been very well-constructed in terms of demographics).
A similar thing happened in 2008 with California’s Prop 8 (on same-sex marriage rights). Although the polls were never quite as substantial as Colorado’s, final polling indicated the measure would probably fail (it was another negatively-worded bill so that a “yes” vote would bar same-sex marriage and a “no” vote would permit it) by a very narrow margin (undecided responses, however, tended to put the measure within the margin of error for either side–a poll with 44% yes and 49% no and a 6% undecided and a 3% MOE essentially meant a tie). The only absolute certainty about the bill’s passage was the influx of far-right religious groups spending money on ads to support passage (and there was some anecdotal evidence that a number of local pastors and priests were urging their congregations and parishioners to vote for the bill despite the bar on such activity).
I don’t particularly trust polls either. I’ve just spent so many years noticing they are all over the place and it depends upon which poll you’re looking at. All of them, that I’m aware of are either skewed left, or right.
You can’t just look a poll numbers. Who is doing the polls, the exact questions asked, and most of all, the people who are being polled must all be very very carefully examined! I believe that polls that say Don Von Shitzinpants is ahead are deliberately being skewed to say what the poll taker(s) want them to say.