Everyone thinks that there are but few, wandering here and there in the desert. My lord, I suspect an incredible secret has been kept on this planet: that the Fremen exist in vast numbers – vast.
Duncan Idaho to Duke Leto Atreides (Dune)
USC Dornsife Daybreak Poll was one of the few polls in 2016 to predict a Trump win. They have changed their methodology and like most mainstream polls they show a Biden lead. However on October 26 they published a paper showing some interesting results when they asked what they described as experimental questions:
The “social-circle question” asks respondents to report the percentage of their social contacts they expect to vote for each of the candidates. The other one, known as the “state winner question,” asks participants who they think will win the election in their state.
When we calculate how many electoral votes each candidate could get based on state level averages of the own-intention and social-circle questions, it’s looking like an Electoral College loss for Biden. We should note that our poll was not designed for state-level predictions, and in some states we have very few participants. Even so, in 2016 it predicted that Trump would win the electoral vote.
In fact, in the last presidential election the social-circle question was more successful than both the own-intention question and aggregate polls in predicting winners of four of five swing states that unexpectedly went to Trump (Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin). The own-intention question accurately predicted just three of the swing states and aggregate polling failed to accurately predict any of them.
What about the question asking poll participants how they expect people in their state will vote?
This state-winner question produces even more pessimistic Electoral College results for Biden. It’s possible, however, that respondents to this question may be even more susceptible to the belief that, because of Trump’s surprise victory in the last election, he’ll win again. They might have such a strong mistrust of polls that they believe Trump will win because most polls show that he won’t.
Go here to read the rest. Polls traditionally do a poor job of predicting the strength of populist politicians because populism tends to mix up traditional voting patterns. More to the point, Trump is sui generis, a citizen non politician who won his first race, which happened to be for the Presidency. Add this to the problems that pollsters have getting adequate responses from rural whites and white men without college degrees, and another polling debacle is in the works. Cudos to USC Dornsife Daybreak Poll for at least perceiving the problem.
