Election 2024: 'It’s not that Trump is some mystical force. The problems are practical.'
Reeling from off-the-mark polling results in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections, the nation's pollsters are trying to get their arms around the influence Donald Trump has been having on poll respondents which makes their jobs al most impossible.
According to a report from Politico's Steven Shepard, Donald Trump has created nothing but chaos by hyping outlier polls to boost his standing which is creating a "feedback loop" that impacts other surveys of voter intent.
Trump's power to skew the numbers can be illustrated by polling difficulties in 2016 and 2020, when the numbers didn't reflect the eventual results, and the 2022 midterms when he was not on the ballot and pollsters' predictions were closer to reality.
With 2024 looming, Politico is reporting, "with Trump expanding his lead over his GOP primary rivals, pollsters are fretting about a bloc of the electorate that has made his support nearly impossible to measure accurately."
ALSO IN THE NEWS: 'Instant chaos' looms over 2024 election if the Supreme Court punts on 'electoral bomb' case
According to Politico, "It’s not that Trump is some mystical force. The problems are practical. In 2020, he drew out significant numbers of people who had rarely — if ever — voted and who either weren’t included in polls or refused to participate in them. Trump trashed the polls that found him consistently trailing Biden. This created a feedback loop that made his supporters even less likely to respond, making the polls even more wrong."
Don Levy, the director of the Siena College Research Institute, was upfront about 2024 concerns.
“If anybody wants to really be honest, it is going to be an enormous challenge if it indeed is going to be Trump [against] Biden in ’24,” Levy explained before warning, “Because we know that that voter is disinclined to speak to us.”
Democratic pollster Andrew Baumann chimed in, "I’m still worried. I don’t think that any pollster should be out there feeling super confident that we have everything fixed, because we were confident that we did after 2016. And we didn’t.”
You can read more here.