Dear
Media, Stop Freaking Out About
Donald Trump’s Polls
John Mauldin
I’m
going to offer something a little different in this week’s Outside the Box. Nate Silver
has consistently been one of the best political analysts of the past 12 years.
I wasn’t terribly enamored of his move from the New York Times to ESPN – to go back to covering
sports rather than politics – but he still covers politics over at 538.
This
past week he wrote an article called “Dear Media, Stop Freaking Out About
Donald Trump’s Polls.” It’s not that he’s got an anti-Trump bias, but he points
out in this insightful article that polls taken this month aren’t really
telling us anything, and at the end of the piece he shows us what the breakdown
of people who are firmly decided on their presidential candidate probably is
for Iowa and New Hampshire. If nothing else, that will either make you happy
because your favorite guy or gal may not actually be that far behind (assuming
you’re Republican, that is) or it will demonstrate the dubious value not just
of political polls but also of consumer and economic surveys as opposed to hard
facts.
Silver’s
analysis speaks to the skeptic in me. In his analysis, Donald Trump still comes
in at the top of the heap of announced candidates, but “undecided” is a massive
winner. That won’t be the case on February 1 when the Iowa caucuses are
actually held, and Nate discusses how and when people actually make decisions
on such things. If you are like me and find yourself faced with the choices
given us today, you may be (1) overwhelmed and (2) not exactly sure who to
support. There is a lot to like about a lot of them, but the choice is
confusing to say the least. Do you pick the candidate you think can do best in
November, or do you pick the candidate you would really like to be president? I
think you will find this a fun and interesting read.
Even
though I am not traveling, I seem to stay just as busy as ever. I am beginning
to whittle my inbox down while trying to keep up on my book research. When you
start trying to write a book on what the world will look like in 20 years,
there are just so many moving parts. We are also dealing with well over 100
different research assistants, and trying to coordinate all that and hit
writing deadlines does make for a full day. An interesting day to be sure, but
full.
You
have a great week and be sure to check your inbox for my letter this week. It
will have a major announcement that I am sure will intrigue you.
Your
skeptical about polls in general analyst,
John Mauldin, Editor
Outside the Box
Dear Media, Stop Freaking Out About Donald Trump’s Polls
By Nate Silver
Originally published on FiveThirtyEight.com
Originally published on FiveThirtyEight.com
Lately, pundits and punters seem bullish on Donald Trump, whose chances of
winning the Republican presidential nomination recently inched above 20 percent for the first time at the
betting market Betfair. Perhaps the conventional wisdom assumes that the
aftermath of the terrorist attacks in Paris will play into Trump’s hands, or that Republicans really might be in disarray. If so, I can see
where the case for Trump is coming from, although I’d still say a 20 percent
chance is substantially too high.
Quite often, however, the Trump’s-really-got-a-chance! case is rooted almost entirely
in polls. If nothing Trump has said so far has harmed his standing with
Republicans, the argument goes, why should we expect him to fade later
on?
One problem with this is that it’s not enough for
Trump to merely avoid fading.
Right now, he has 25 to 30 percent of the vote in polls among the roughly 25 percent of Americans who identify as Republican.
(That’s something like 6 to 8 percent of the electorate overall, or about the
same share of people who think the Apollo moon landings were faked.) As the rest of
the field consolidates around him, Trump will need to gain additional support
to win the nomination. That might not be easy, since some Trump actions that appeal to
a faction of the Republican electorate may alienate the rest of it. Trump’s favorability ratings are middling among Republicans (and awful among the broader electorate).
Trump will also have to get that 25 or 30 percent
to go to the polls. For now, most surveys cover Republican-leaning adults or
registered voters, rather than likely voters. Combine that with the poor response rates to polls and the fact that an
increasing number of polls use nontraditional sampling methods, and it’s not
clear how much overlap there is between the people included in these surveys
and the relatively small share of Republicans who will turn up to vote in
primaries and caucuses.
But there’s another, more fundamental problem.
That 25 or 30 percent of the vote isn’t really Donald Trump’s for the keeping.
In fact, it doesn’t belong to any candidate. If past nomination races are any
guide, the vast majority of eventual Republican voters haven’t made up their
minds yet.
It can be easy to forget it if you cover politics
for a living, but most people aren’t paying all that much attention to the
campaign right now. Certainly, voters are consuming some campaign-related news.
Debate ratings are way up, and Google searches for topics related to the primaries1 have been
running slightly ahead of where they were at a comparable point of the 2008
campaign, the last time both parties had open races. But most voters have a lot
of competing priorities. Developments that can dominate a political news cycle,
like Trump’s frenzied 90-minute speech in Iowa earlier this month, may
reach only 20 percent or so of Americans.
We can look deeper into the Google search data for
some evidence of this. In the chart below, I’ve tracked the aggregate share of
primary-related searches in the 2008 and 2012 presidential cycles, based on the
number of weeks before or after the Iowa caucuses.2 As you can see,
public attention to the race starts out quite slow and only gradually
accelerates – until just a week or two before Iowa, when it begins to boom.
Interest continues to accelerate as Iowa, New Hampshire and the Super Tuesday
states vote, before slowing down again once the outcome of the race has become
clear.
To repeat: This burst of attention occurs quite
late – usually when voters are days or weeks away from their primary or caucus.
At this point in the 2012 nomination cycle, 10 weeks before the Iowa caucuses,
only 16 percent of the eventual total of Google searches had been conducted. At
this point in the 2008 cycle, only 8 percent had been. Voters are still in the
early stages of their information-gathering process.
But maybe you don’t trust the Google search data.
That’s OK; exit polls like this
one have historically asked voters in Iowa and New Hampshire when they made
their final decision on how to vote. These exit polls find that voters take
their sweet time. In Iowa, on average, only 35 percent of voters had come to a
final decision before the final month of the campaign. And in New Hampshire,
only 29 percent had. (Why is the fraction lower in New Hampshire than in Iowa?
Probably because voters there are waiting for the Iowa results before locking
in their choice. In fact, about half of New Hampshire voters make up their
minds in the final week of the campaign.)
By comparison, voters decide much earlier in
general elections. In Ohio in 2012, for example, 76 percent of voters had settled on Mitt Romney or Barack Obama by the end of September.
This is why it’s common to see last-minute surges or busts in nomination races
(think Rick Santorum or Howard Dean), but not in general elections.
If even by New Year’s Day (a month before the Iowa
caucuses, which are scheduled for Feb. 1) only about one-third of Iowa voters
will have come to their final decision, the percentage must be even lower now –
perhaps something like 20 percent of voters are locked in. When you see an Iowa
poll, you should keep in mind that the real situation looks something more like
this:3
So, could Trump win? We confront two stubborn
facts: first, that nobody remotely like Trump has won a major-party nomination
in the modern era.4 And second, as is always a problem in analysis
of presidential campaigns, we don’t have all that many data points, so
unprecedented events can occur with some regularity. For my money, that adds up
to Trump’s chances being higher than 0 but (considerably) less than 20 percent.
Your mileage may vary. But you probably shouldn’t rely solely on the polls to
make your case; it’s still too soon for that.
Footnotes
- The statistics I describe in
this article cover U.S.-based searches for Google search topic “primary elections.” It’s possible that this
data includes a small number of searches for non-presidential races such
as gubernatorial primaries, but the historical timing of the peaks in the
data suggests that the vast majority are related to the presidency.
- The chart covers the period
from a year before the Iowa caucus to late June of the election year.
- The numbers below reflect what
you get if you take the Real Clear Politics average, put 80 percent of voters in the undecided
category and scale everyone down accordingly.
- There are better precedents for
candidates like Bernie Sanders and Ted Cruz, who might loosely be compared
to George McGovern and Barry Goldwater.
Nate Silver is the founder and editor in chief of
FiveThirtyEight.
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