How Big Biden Poll Leads are Manufactured

registration success by Republicans over Democrats since Covid-19 hit and enthusiasm of the parties for their respective candidates, we should expect that general pattern to repeat. Signs of a massive Democratic wave of voter turnout do not exist.

Some of the most prominent and well-regarded pollsters, however, assume an Independent turnout that dwarfs Republican turnout and a Democratic turnout exceeding that of Republicans by six to ten percent. Why assume such an unlikely turnout model?

The most recent ABC News/Washington Post poll found a fifteen-point lead for Biden among registered voters. A number like that probably encourages anyone who believes the number to give up on Trump. But before tossing the MAGA hat in the trash, one must look closely at the internals of the poll. The pollster assumed a six-point advantage for Democrats over the GOP (D+6), an Independent turnout of 39% and a Republican turnout of only 24%. Not once in nine elections have Independents outnumbered Republicans, but they assume a fifteen-point Independent turnout over Republicans. This represents malpractice at best and intentional deception at worst. One cannot make a reasonable argument for this dramatic shift in voter behavior, especially considering the evidence showing that new registrations overall are down, and particularly among Democrats since Covid-19 struck.

Consider five of the most recent national polls by Fox News, ABC/Washington Post, Quinnipiac University, Monmouth University and the New York Times. In the graph below, the far left columns labeled "Last 9 Turnout" represent the average turnout among political parties in the US over the last nine presidential elections. The Fox poll of registered voters next to it had a turnout that resembled the last nine and found a lead of eight points among registered voters for Biden at this point. A lead of eight with all registered voters translates roughly to a lead of five points among likely voters because Democrat leaners are over-represented in registered voter polls. Look now at the remainder of the columns, how the yellow and/or blue columns are spiked well above the red. This is how leads are manufactured for Democrats, by including large numbers of unlikely voters in the D and I columns who tend to lean more Democratic.

Only Obama achieved such a high Democratic turnout against two weak candidates, McCain and Romney. Those two elections represent the exceptions rather than the rule for obvious reasons. Obama was the first black man to run for president, an immeasurably historic first for everyone, including Republicans. Making the deficit worse for Republicans, McCain and Romney had equal amounts of charisma and political instinct, zero.

Republicans are more enthusiastic about voting than the Democrats this time around. Source: Economist/YouGov, https://docs.cdn.yougov.com/lraqqdhd7j/econTabReport.pdf

Trump will no doubt drive turnout up among Republicans rendering a D+6 turnout impossible, especially considering that early evidence suggests that coronavirus is stifling new voter registrations among Democrats while not impacting Republican turnout efforts. Specifically there are fewer overall new registrations since the beginning of the Covid-19 crisis, depicted on the graph below. Source: TargetSmart, https://insights.targetsmart.com/covids-impact-on-voter-registration-raw-numbers-registration-gap-analysis.html

Making matters worse for pollsters assuming a huge Democratic turnout, this drop in voter registrations has disproportionately come from Democrats. Page Gardner of the Democratic affiliated Voter Participation Center called the pandemic a, "perfect horrible storm in terms of undercutting registration efforts, and undercutting people's ability to get registered." (New York Post, https://nypost.com/2020/07/11/gop-voter-registrations-outpace-dems-in-swing-states-report/).

You can see how this has impacted Democrats more than Republicans by looking at the new registrations of non-whites, a group that is majority Democratic leaning in voting. In all but two swing states, non-white voter registrations are down since Covid-19 began. Source: TargetSmart, https://insights.targetsmart.com/covids-impact-on-voter-registration-raw-numbers-registration-gap-analysis.html

So we can see that since Covid-19 hit us in late March, the Democrats have been losing the registration battle. It's not clear why anyone would conclude when looking at this evidence that Democrats and newly registered Independents will swamp Republicans in the vote. But more than that, it seems that in critical battleground states Republicans and not Democrats have more room to grow in terms of expanding its voting base. According to the Knight Foundation's 100 Million Project, potential voters who stay home in Arizona, Pennsylvania and Florida lean more Republican than Democrat. So even if there is a bigger turnout than usual, it very well may stand to benefit Trump, not Biden, in those key states.

While it is a betrayal of trust for pollsters to assume big Democratic turnout advantages when the evidence does not support it, perhaps even more egregious than that are the assumptions that Independents will compose nearly 40% of the electorate. The Democrats gain a bit on Trump in the polls with the D+6 assumption, probably about three points. But they gain considerably more with the assumption of a huge Independent vote and a scrawny Republican turnout. The majority of the Independents who will not actually vote, but who are nevertheless included in the polls, are most likely Democratic leaning voters. We know this because it is well established that Democratic leaning Independent voters tend to stay home more frequently than Republican leaning Independent voters.

In outlining how pollsters determine which respondents will likely vote, the Pew Research Center noted that, "in general, Republicans are more likely than Democrats to turn out, though they may be about equally likely to say they intend to vote." In other words, more Democrats claim they will vote but fail to. In another article, Pew points to evidence that there are more Democrat leaners among all adults than registered votes and more Democrat leaners among registered voters than likely voters. Specifically, the evidence they reference shows Trump's approval ratings higher among likely voters than registered voters, and higher among registered voters than all adults. So the more a poll screens out unlikely voters, the better Republicans do. For a more extensive demonstration of this fact, please read the "Why We Offer Adjusted Poll Results" section on the page linked here.

The poll from Quinnipiac University mentioned above derived its fifteen-point lead for Biden by assuming an impossible D+10 turnout advantage. Making matters worse for Trump, they also assumed a 34% Independent turnout and only a 24% Republican turnout despite the fact that this has not happened, or even come close, even once in the last nine elections.

The Monmouth University poll mentioned above managed to squeeze out a twelve-point lead for Biden utilizing an unrealistic and outsized Independent turnout of 38% compared to only 29% for Republicans. This also probably delivered about three points to the Democratic candidate. Then finally, the great champion of fake Trump news, the New York Times, ostensibly manufactured a fourteen point lead for Biden by using the double whammy, a D+9 and I+7 turnout assumption above Republicans. Sienna College, the pollster for the Times, assumed that Trump, who is armed with a huge money advantage, the presidency and an army of enthused and dedicated followers, could only a muster a turnout of 26% of the electorate.

This is not legitimate polling. One can fairly label these fake polls. This is deliberate deception and a dark reflection on these pollsters. These truly rigged polls amount to nothing less than propaganda designed to demoralize one side of the political debate using knowingly false assumptions. Appallingly, fivethirtyeight.com rates all of these pollsters highly despite their sub-par track record for predicting elections and these absurd polls. The New York Times/Sienna College receives an A+ despite only achieving 69% success in predicting elections. ABC/Washington Post receives an A+ with only a 71% success rate. Monmouth gets an A+ with an 81% rate of success. And Quinnipiac gets a B+ with the highest success rate of 83%. But fivethirtyeight.com is known as a left-leaning website, so the ratings are already suspect.

Do not believe the huge leads these elitist pollsters are showing. Trump is behind, but he is most likely within the margin of error among likely voters. If a pollster does an honest registered voter poll they tend to find Trump down about eight points. That means he's probably down among likely voters somewhere around five points. To that point, after the most recent national poll updates factored yesterday, our average shows Trump down 4.4 points nationally. Our averages look at poll internals and applies them to what we believe is the most likely voter turnout model on election day. This is the method that allowed us to project forty-eight of fifty states correctly in the last election, more than any other projection.

If Trump can pull within two or three points nationally in the polls, he can win. That means we have a close race on our hands. The battleground polls show about a five-point lead for Biden. Those polls are likely missing some small share of the Trump vote as well. He's very likely about three points off from winning in the battleground states and nationally.

The leftist media knows it which is why they are working so hard to demoralize Trump supporters. If they can whittle away at Trump's support just enough, they know it can make the difference. Don't let them confuse you with these fake polls. You should save these polls in PDF format and highlight the internals and email them to your left-leaning friends along with a link to this article anytime they tell you how far behind Trump is based on these pollsters' numbers, or any future Republican for that matter. If Trump supporters allow themselves to get discouraged by such obvious propaganda, they deserve to lose.