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Prominent Election Expert Suggests Pollsters ‘Have No Idea’ If They’re Accurately Measuring Trump Support

Prominent Election Expert Suggests Pollsters 'Have No Idea' If They're Accurately Measuring Trump Support

University of Virginia Center for Politics Director Larry Sabato on Friday suggested that pollsters are uncertain if they’re accurately gauging former President Donald Trump’s support.

Trump outperformed his polling in the 2016 election, where he defeated former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and in 2020 when he narrowly lost to President Joe Biden. Sabato, on “CNN News Central,” said he has spoken with numerous pollsters who have attempted to refine their methods, but they still don’t know if they’ve fully solved the issue of polling accuracy.

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“They’re very fragile instruments. And even a really good polling organization is going to have an outlier that’s unrepresentative every now and then, for statistical reasons only. So you have to look at the entire universe of data that’s available to you. Now, once you do that, I think you can reasonably conclude two things,” Sabato said. “One is that the better pollsters, the ones who are willing to spend money to do their job better and not be embarrassed after election day, have tried to improve their polling to take into account people who were hiding from the pollsters, who favored Donald Trump disproportionately in 2016 and 2020.”

“And that’s a good thing. Here’s the bad news, ’cause I’ve talked to many of the pollsters about this. They have no idea if it’s going to work this time either,” he added.

Trump presently has slim advantages over Vice President Kamala Harris in six of the seven main swing states, with the vice president only leading by 0.3% in Wisconsin, according to the RealClearPolling averages. CNN senior data reporter Enten noted on Tuesday that if Trump exceeds his 2024 polling by the identical margin he did against Biden in 2020, he will win sufficient battleground states to beat Harris “in a blowout.”

Enten on Friday said Harris’ one-point lead in his own aggregated data in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin is a smaller margin than three weeks ago and notably lower than the leads Clinton and Biden held over Trump on Oct. 11 in 2016 and 2020.

“Well, if you look eight years ago, Hillary Clinton was way out in front in an average of these three, she was up by eight,” Enten said. “You go four years ago, Joe Biden was up by an average of seven points across these three Great Lake battleground states, yet come today, it’s just a one-point advantage for Kamala Harris across these three Great Lake battleground states.”

“So Kamala Harris, at least in the polling, is doing considerably worse than Biden or Clinton. And of course, Clinton lost in all three of these states. And Joe Biden barely won in all three of these states,” he added. “So when you see Harris up by just a point across these three, I think that this is really the type of thing that gets Democrats really to worry.”