Wall Street Journal
OPINION
MAIN STREET
What Pollsters Miss About Trump
A self-described ‘cowboy’ explains why he thinks the president will defy expectations and win again.
By William McGurn
November 2, 2020
Matt Towery thought he’d retired from the polling business. But this election year has him feeling a little like Michael Corleone. Just when he thought he was out, he says, they pulled him back in.
Mr. Towery, a practicing attorney living in Florida, is a former columnist with Creators Syndicate and founder and chairman of InsiderAdvantage, a political news site. If people are eager to hear his take on this election, it’s because in 2016 Mr. Towery was among the very few pollsters who called it for Donald Trump. On this election eve, with most polls and models again predicting all but certain defeat for Mr. Trump, I ask Mr. Towery if he’s still confident the president will pull out another victory.
“I am,” he answers, “and I’m increasingly confident.”
Mr. Towery dismisses polls showing huge leads for Joe Biden because the state races will be tight and their models aren’t that good at “picking up the average guy on the street.” Cellphones have only made it harder to get a good representative sample, especially from young people.
“How many young people do you know who will answer a call from an unknown number on their cellphones and happily spend the next 20 minutes answering questions?” he asks.
Firms such as InsiderAdvantage may be better at responding to this challenge, because they use a mix of techniques to get answers to their polls. He calls these firms “cowboy pollsters,” and says that unlike those who work for the networks and big press outlets, these are generally independent operators based outside New York and Washington. He says the Atlanta-based Trafalgar Group, which also got it right in 2016, is another example of a cowboy pollster.
In the final days of Mr. Trump’s 2016 run, Mr. Towery wrote a memo outlining why he thought the polling was off, ranging from overweighting for Democratic voters to underweighting for male and white voters. Sean Hannity read it on the air in one of his last radio shows before the election. Most polls, the memo said, “were being weighted based on a conventional turnout in a very unconventional year and there is a ‘Trump vote’ that most pollsters just are not able to capture.”
Its conclusion: “I fully expect Donald Trump to win this election and in a manner that will leave pollsters and pundits stunned.”
Mr. Towery sees similar weaknesses in this year’s polling. Yes, the president has lost support from seniors and women, and while InsiderAdvantage’s last Pennsylvania poll has Mr. Trump ahead, Mr. Towery says the Midwest will be a real battle for the president to hold. But there are other trends he thinks the major polls may be missing.
Start with the black vote. Though he knows Republicans have for years been predicting a swing in the black vote only to be disappointed when it doesn’t come in, he says 14% or 15% for Mr. Trump isn’t impossible this year, which would be up from 8% in 2016. He’s also now seeing a movement toward Mr. Trump from young voters who are tired of being locked up at home because of Covid-19 and see Mr. Biden as the candidate of shutdowns. The momentum, Mr. Towery says, has clearly shifted to the president.
He also holds a contrarian view of the president’s rallies. Unlike media elites and Beltway political observers who dismiss these people and their MAGA hats, Mr. Towery thinks the rallies will pay huge dividends on Election Day. “Trump has an instinct for what a showman needs to show,” he says. He believes the rallies will prove particularly helpful in getting people out in the rural areas where the president needs every last vote.
“Many people are passionate about voting against Trump,” Mr. Towery says. “But the crowds Trump is drawing says there are people who will walk over hot coals to vote for Trump.”
Even those who detest the president must concede his pace has been incredible. In the last three days before the election, Mr. Trump scheduled 14 rallies. Previous Republican presidential candidates who would lose their races—George H.W. Bush, Bob Dole, John McCain—looked resigned to the inevitable as they headed into Election Day. Whatever else you can say about him, Donald Trump is leaving it all on the field.
On Sunday John Fetterman, Pennsylvania’s lieutenant governor, told CNN that “Donald Trump is doing things that have never been done in Pennsylvania politics in terms of the raw barnstorming” across small counties. Mr. Fetterman earlier tweeted a Reuters photo of a huge Trump rally the day before in Butler, Pa., and appended a warning to his fellow Democrats: “The President is popular in PA. I don’t care what the polls say.”
Mr. Towery cheerfully admits he has been wrong before. If he’s wrong this time, he says he’ll ride off into the sunset. But he doesn’t think he’s wrong. “I think the pollsters and pundits who had this a blowout for Biden are not going to be very happy later this week.”
Copyright ©2020 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Appeared in the November 3, 2020, print edition.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.