The Daily - About Those Polls…

Episode Date: November 10, 2020

Nate Cohn, an expert on polling for The New York Times, knows that the predictions for the 2016 presidential election were bad.But this year, he says, they were even worse.So, what happened?Nate talks us through a few of his theories and considers whether, after two flawed performances, polling should be ditched.Guest: Nate Cohn, a domestic correspondent for The Upshot at The New York Times, speaks to us about the polls and breaks down the election results. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily Background reading: As the results rolled in on Tuesday night, so did a strong sense of déjà vu. Pre-election polls, it appeared, had been misleading once again.Leading Republicans — including Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader — have backed President Trump’s refusal to concede.

Hey, it's Michael. This episode has now been updated to clarify our analysis of the Latino vote in the election. From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today, what the results of the election taught us about the American electorate and about the polling that once again failed to correctly understand it. A conversation with my colleague, Nate Cohen. It's Tuesday, November 10th. It's Tuesday, November 10th.

So, Nate, we want to have two conversations with you. The first is about what we learned from the vote, the results of this election, now that the race has been called. And second is what we learned about why the polls were so off once again, including our own polling here at The Times and kind of have a reckoning on that front. Sounds good. Right. I'm sure it's going to be a total pleasure for you. It will be. Let's start with the voters and how this historic turnout for both candidates broke down. And perhaps the most intriguing group in this campaign and so far in the results are Latino voters.

So tell us what the final-ish data is telling you about Latino voters. final-ish data is telling you about Latino voters? Well, I suspect that many listening right now have probably heard that Donald Trump fared quite well among Latino voters. You learn that pretty quickly on election night when the results from Miami-Dade County and Florida come in. And now that we've seen more detailed results from elsewhere in the country, I think we can safely say that Latino voters really swung to Donald Trump. Estimates vary about Latino support for Trump in 2016, but it's somewhere in the

25 to 30 percent range. This year, I mean, we're still waiting for all the numbers, but we're expecting that to look more like 35 percent. And there's been an important focus this year on the fact that the Latino vote is not a monolith and hence the divided support for Biden and Trump. But what's remarkable about this year is that when you look at the results so far, this increase in support for the president is consistent all over the country. It's true in the agricultural regions of California, like the Imperial Valley. It's true in the border towns along the Rio Grande. It's true, as you know, in Cuban areas like Miami-Dade County,

but it's also true in Puerto Rican areas or around Orlando and Kissimmee. And it seems it's even true in the Northern cities like Philadelphia or Milwaukee, where Latino voters are usually the very most reliable for Democrats. And the magnitude of the improvement for the president is really significant.

There are counties along the Rio Grande where Trump picked up 50 points. 50 points among just Latino voters. Yeah, I mean, you can't know for sure that there isn't some contribution of white voters in these counties, of course, but these are places where Latino voters make up the overwhelming majority of the electorate. And we can say the same thing for these Latino enclaves in Philadelphia or Milwaukee. The magnitude of the gains there, it's not as staggering as it is along the Rio Grande, but it's still really stark, 15, 10, 20 point gains for Donald Trump. So, Nia, how do you start to explain what is now a much broader phenomenon than perhaps

broader phenomenon than perhaps many of us thought it would be on election night. Is this the story of Democrats failing to capture this vote? Or is this the story of Donald Trump succeeding in capturing it? Is it both? How are you thinking about this? The first thing I would just say is I think this is a place where reporting on the ground will be really helpful. The polls struggle with Latino voters. You know, in a national survey, you only get 100 Latino voters. It's difficult to amass a lot of Latino respondents to do the kind of deep dives that we can do on larger subgroups like white voters, for instance, who I'm sure we'll get to. As a general framing point, I would say that this election was about Donald Trump. It was a referendum on the president. Joe Biden did everything he could to that this election was about Donald Trump. It was a

referendum on the president. Joe Biden did everything he could to make sure it was about the president. He stayed in his basement, as the Trump campaign often noted. And so I am inclined to assume that when we see big shifts, that it reflects attitudes about the president, not Joe Biden. So we should read into this that the president successfully appealed over the last year or so to this group of voters. That's right. One thing I would point out is that there was always strong evidence that the economy was the president's strong suit in this election. And when you look at the results, not just for Latino voters, but also for other non-Hispanic voters, it does seem to me that the president made his largest gains in less affluent areas. It would not surprise me if that reflects the greater

salience of the economy for economically vulnerable people compared to people who might have the privilege to vote on other issues like cultural issues or the president's conduct in office and so on. A second observation I would make is that to me, this was not an election about immigration in the same way that the 2016 election was sort of about immigration. Trump's pledge to build the wall, his comments, you know, on his very first day, he sought the presidency when he said that Mexicans were rapists and criminals and so on. Hillary Clinton in 2016 really focused on immigration as one of her major critiques of the president. And I wouldn't say that was nearly so true in 2020. I don't think immigration even

came up in the first presidential debate. So I think you can imagine that immigration became less salient to not just Hispanic voters, but all voters. But that was particularly consequential among Hispanic voters, because I think we can at least hypothesize that many Latino voters in 2016 were skeptical of the president in part because of the way he talked about this issue. So the issue that might have hurt President Trump with Latino voters, immigration was far less prominent this time than four years ago. And the thing that would potentially help him the most with Latino voters. The economy did seem to work in his favor insofar as Latino voters identified him with economic prosperity, especially pre-pandemic economic prosperity.

Yeah, that's right. And one final point I would make is that the president has always done really well among white voters without a degree. His schtick has had appeal for that demographic group. And I don't think that's just about policy. I also think it's about his conduct. I think that the Trump Act has appeal to a lot of people who haven't previously been terribly receptive to Republican politicians in the past. And I think that if we're honest, that it's not always obvious why the president's appeal to white working class voters on the economy or in terms of his conduct and temperament would

also have appeal to working class voters who are non-white, whether they're black or Latino. So I could cobble together a theory that sort of says that many of the things that appeal to white working class voters about Donald Trump may appeal to Hispanic voters as well. But in 2016, that was obsc to make among white working class, traditionally Democratic voters in 2016. It's interesting, Nate, that you made that parallel because as you were describing what's happening here, it occurred to me that if you are the Democratic Party, the last major group of voters that were perhaps taken for granted in the past decade or so were white working class voters, especially in the Midwest. Democratic leaders kind of thought

those voters were unquestioningly theirs. I wonder if that's the right way of thinking about how the Democratic Party saw Latino voters in 2020, that there was an assumption that they would be with Joe Biden, and they just were not to the same degree. I think that's right. I think there are a lot of people in this country who became Democrats during an era when the Democratic Party was the party of working people and the Republicans were the party of the rich and business interests who, over the last four years, have come to see the president as a different kind of Republican. And the president has denied the Democrats some of their traditional advantage among working class voters of all races as a result. This was not a campaign about privatizing Social Security. It wasn't a campaign about the minimum wage and so on. Instead, the Democrats have advanced a sort of idealistic liberal message with obvious resonance, at least among college educated voters.

And it didn't have the same resonance among working class voters. And Democrats in the past have gotten away with it by falling back on their traditional strength among these groups. Longstanding allegiance that has maybe been eroded now that the Republicans have put forward a more populist candidate. Okay. Nate, what about Black voters? What did we learn about this population from the results of Biden's victory? I think that I would make a few points about what happened with Black voters. One is that it seems to me that although Black turnout increased, it did not increase the same extent as it increased among non-Black voters. And so as a result, the Black share of the electorate seemed to decline.

Hmm. The number of Black Americans who voted did increase, but the number of everybody else increased just a little bit more. That's right. So you may recall that in 2016, the turnout in places like Milwaukee and Philadelphia and Detroit was down, and it was down by so much that Hillary Clinton narrowly lost. In 2020, the turnout was up significantly, enough that if you could go back in time with this black turnout, Hillary Clinton would have been the president. Wow. But yet the white turnout elsewhere in these states increased by even more, such that if you could go back in time and increase white turnout in 2016 to the same extent, Donald Trump would then come back and be president again. Wow. That is actually fascinating. You're saying if you applied the increase in both the black and white vote that occurred this year, back then, you'd get the same result.

That's right. In the end, the black versus white turnout dynamic did not change in a way that would have allowed the Democrats to prevail four years ago. And among the black voters who turned out, what percentage supported Biden versus President Trump? Because I have the sense that the president did somewhat better with Black voters than was expected. I think that's right to an extent. I think that this is, again, a case where we'll need to see the final data before we nail this down. But let's just say that Biden won roughly 90% of the Black vote and that Donald Trump won around 10% of the Black vote, give or take. You know, we'll see what the final numbers are. That will be better for Donald Trump than in 2016. And if I were forced to explain it, I would chalk up a similar explanation

to what I told you with Latino voters, where some combination of the president's economic appeal and so on was able to help him peel off just a little bit. But I don't want to overthink it too much. This is a pretty small shift, all things considered. And the Democrats continue to command the overwhelming support of Black voters. Nate, if your theory is accurate, and what connects the improvement by Donald Trump among Latino and Black voters is his economic message, what's interesting about that, of course, is that the economy is doing terribly right now because of the pandemic. And so it means that there's kind of a vestigial affection for the president's success, you know, a year ago, right? The way the stock market did before the pandemic, the way job growth was going before the pandemic. But it's remarkable that he's still getting credit for that, given where things are right now. Here are the points I would make. One,

you're totally right. I think that the president does still get credit for the way he handled the economy during ordinary circumstances. And people can rationally believe that the president was a good steward of the economy when coronavirus wasn't in the picture, and therefore he'll be a good steward of the economy once coronavirus is out of the picture. The second thing I would say is that I think that he also has gotten some credit from people for the way he handled the economy during the coronavirus. The stimulus package was really popular. The Democrats have not criticized the way he's handled the economy during the coronavirus. They've only criticized his handling of the coronavirus. And even on his handling of the coronavirus,

the main criticism of him is that he's too eager to reopen the economy. So it's a little bit complicated to make people go through the logic of, here's someone who wants to reopen the economy and therefore is on the side of getting people back to work and so on. But he's actually bad for the economy because that step that's facially good for the economy will contribute to the spread of the coronavirus before shutdowns which hurt the economy.

That's, you know, I do think that we take that logic for granted in a way that I'm not sure we should expect of ordinary people. Fair point. Okay, so I now want to turn to a group that we have been talking about a lot throughout this campaign, a group that was predicted to potentially be decisive in this election, and that was suburban voters. Polls predicted that many of the suburban voters who had voted for Trump four years ago would swing to Biden. Did that end up happening?

That's the thing that ended up happening. And it was just enough for him to get over the top in the northern battleground states, as well as in Arizona and in Georgia. Across the country, Joe Biden did better in suburban areas than Hillary Clinton did four years ago. His gains were largest in traditionally Republican suburban areas, like Atlanta, like Dallas, like Jacksonville, Indianapolis, Kansas City, Grand Rapids, Michigan, places that are not full of liberal suburbanites that have been voting Democratic for a really long time, like Westchester County or the suburbs of D.C. and Philadelphia. And don't get me wrong, Biden did make gains in a lot of those traditionally Democratic suburban areas,

but the biggest gains were in the areas where 10 or 15 years ago, the Republicans dominated among the suburban vote. And now a lot of traditionally Republican affluent white voters in those areas are saying, wait a second, this isn't the Republican Party I signed up for and now have swung pretty decisively to the Democrats. And do we know why there was this shift? why there was this shift. It feels like that word you just used, affluence, may be an element of it, that these are voters who can financially afford to cast a vote based on whether they like Trump or Biden.

Yeah, I definitely think there's something to that. You know, I think that there are a lot of rich white people in the suburbs of Dallas, in the suburbs of Atlanta, who've been voting for their tax cuts for a very long time, but Donald Trump crossed a line with them in terms of his personal conduct. And they are willing to vote on what they feel

and think about him as a person in a way that maybe other people are not necessarily so inclined to do. I also do think there is a policy element of it as well. I think that immigration has always been popular and free trade has always been popular among a big chunk of conservative voters in suburbs across the South. And the president has departed from traditional Republican views on some of those issues in a way that may at least somewhat complicate the idea that this is strictly a vote against their policy views. vote against their policy views. But I do think it's true that it's a lot easier for someone making $200,000 a year to vote against their perceived economic interests than it would be

if you make $20,000 a year. Okay. So finally, what about white, non-college educated voters, many of whom are in rural America, not suburban. So we may be talking about ex-urban or rural voters. This is traditionally seen as the president's base. This is the group that Biden had hoped he would start to poach. How successfully did he do that? How well did President Trump defend this space for himself according to the data that you have seen. Donald Trump defended his base here and to a far greater extent than any of the pre-election polls anticipated. As far as I can tell,

Joe Biden didn't make any gains in rural America among white voters since 2016. And as you alluded to, the whole sort of premise of choosing Scranton Joe was that if the Democrats nominated a white moderate with some populist appeal, that you could win back some of the voters who backed Barack Obama in 2012, supported Donald Trump in 2016. And that just didn't happen. And in many cases, Donald Trump extended his gains. There are places in rural Iowa and rural Ohio where Donald Trump did even better

than he did four years ago. And that is just the exact opposite of what the pre-election poll said. So something went very wrong in the public opinion research there. Well, we will get to that. But Nate, at the end of the day, if I'm putting all these pieces together the way I think you have intended for me to, it feels like suburban voters end up being the most important group to shift and shift in the direction of Joe Biden. Is that correct? That's absolutely right. We have known for a very long time that voters had deep reservations about Donald Trump. We know that he only received 46% of the national vote in 2016. We know that he was the least popular candidate in terms of favorability ratings when he was elected. And the president

had four years to try and address those shortcomings. It seems that his handling of the economy and his performance on the job was enough to persuade some number of more economically vulnerable voters, or maybe just voters in general, even higher on the economic spectrum, to support his reelection despite the personal reservations that they've probably had about him for years. In nominating Joe Biden, someone who was fairly broadly appealing and who promised to unify the country and to act in a way more befitting of the office, that Joe Biden was able to consolidate a significant number of voters who have had longstanding reservations about the president, especially college educated voters, especially traditionally Republican tilting independent voters in the suburbs around many of our largest cities. And that, to me, tells you a very odd and interesting story. It says that the economy can really help the president, as we've already known, but there are limits to it. We'll be right back. Let's take a look at our new poll, and the headline number is this. This is a wow. The largest lead of the race for Joe Biden. Joe Biden with a 14-point lead nationally over President Trump.

10 points. 12-point lead over Trump. The largest lead of the race for Joe Biden, but 16 points spread. Joe Biden leads in Michigan. He leads in North Carolina. He leads in Pennsylvania. He leads in Wisconsin. Joe Biden is leading President Trump by 11 points in Wisconsin in the latest New York Times Siena College poll. Joe Biden is in the hunt in these races that have been going red of late in these states. So imagine Joe Biden's election night could also include North Carolina, could possibly include Florida. This is not an out-of-the-question map here for Joe Biden, given the state of the race right now.

So, Nate, now for the root canal section of this conversation. You cover polling for The Times, You cover polling for The Times, and you are involved in how polling itself is conducted for and by The Times along with our partners. And we all know at this point that there was significant polling error this year. How would you describe the level of polling error in 2020? I would consider this to be far worse than 2016. Really? Far worse. In terms of the difference between the final poll results and the actual results,

the difference is not that much worse than 2016. It's pretty comparable. But pollsters this year do not have the same excuses that they had four years ago. And I think that the error is much more systematic and betrays much more fundamental problems with the effort to represent the electorate than the polling did four years ago. And I want you to give us some examples, just so we are on the same page. When you say the polls are worse this time than four years ago, what do you mean by that?

The, maybe it's easier to start with 2016 for a second. The polls did a good job of representing white voters without a degree in that they showed white voters without a degree being great for Trump against Hillary Clinton, but they did not have enough of those voters. And although that is a serious problem in polling to not have enough of a certain demographic group, it is a common problem in polling and it is a fixable problem because you can give

more weight to voters from that demographic group. And in the post-election analysis four years ago, pollsters found that when they gave more weight to that group, that the polls did pretty well. In 2020, pollsters did that. They gave more weight to white working class voters, but they were no closer to the result. Even though we know that the same technique four years ago would have brought the polls closer to the result. So I just want to be clear on this. You're saying what makes the error in 2020 greater and more grievous than 2016 is that we entered 2020 having made meaningful adjustments to our polling methodology, all polls, when it comes to the presidential election, and yet we still had super

off polls despite those reforms and adjustments. Not only were they super off, though, they were just as bad. And what that means is that while four years ago, the polls showed Donald Trump doing really well among white voters without a degree and had too few of them. This year, the polls had the right number of white voters without a degree, but they showed Joe Biden doing way better among this group than he actually did. So for all this election, we've been saying white voters that would agree who voted for Donald Trump in 2016 appear to have

come back for Joe Biden. And that didn't happen. Okay, so how do you explain the level of error that you just ticked through after all the corrections made four years ago to try to ensure that this would never happen? I am going to try and answer your question. But before I do that, I do want to say that it is too soon to have a definitive autopsy on this. I mean, to take that analogy a little further, the body is still dead at the scene of the crime. It has not made it to the morgue yet for us to go into the details and dig in to see exactly what went on here. I mean, but we know the polls went really wrong, but it's going to be a bit until we've nailed down exactly why. So I'm- But assuming you're a crime scene investigator and you're there and you're trying to figure it out, what do you know so far? Yeah, I can just toss out some ideas and that's all

they are at this stage. Please. We have seen over the last four years a huge increase in political participation on the left. We also know that political participation correlates with participating in polls, which makes sense. You get called and you either choose to take the survey or not. And if that interests you because you're interested in politics, you're likelier to take a poll. This could mean that Democrats became a little more likely to take a poll. That's one possibility. Another possibility is to look at on the other side, that Trump voters are less likely to respond to surveys than they were four years ago. Perhaps the president's attacks on the media and institutions have gradually eroded their trust in surveys.

Maybe even the 2016 result itself had a role in diminishing their willingness to trust in surveys. Maybe even the 2016 result itself had a role in diminishing their willingness to participate in surveys because the polls were off by so much that now they don't trust them and don't want to play. We make sure in the state of Pennsylvania that 41% of our interviews are with Republicans or whatever the number was in that area. Which Republicans picked up the phone?

Were they the ones that were really enthusiastic about the president in rural areas? Or were they the people who are also registered as Republican but are no longer fans of the president? I think that we have to conclude that we got the ones who are more likely not to be fans of the president. That's not to say we didn't get plenty of people

who supported the president, but enough of a difference compared to reality that you nudge all of the polls in one direction. Well, Nate, we've had four years of the president speaking about the organizations that conduct polling in a very specific way. And that would be the New York Times, which conducts polls. That would be ABC News. That would be CNN. That would be CBS. And he has described them as the enemy of the people. He has described them as fake media. So I don't have a hugely hard time understanding

why his supporters would be skeptical of answering our calls. No, I think that four years of the president advancing that message could have had a negative effect on the polls. I think that's totally possible. I don't have any proof of that. But what's important about that theory is that it could potentially explain why the polls have gotten worse since 2016. That, to me, is the key part of any theory if you really want to try and dig into what's happening here.

After two presidential elections that pretty much committed the same sin, perhaps for different reasons, that election polling, pre-election polling, is broken? That's a great question. And I think it depends on the level of precision that you expect out of it. And there's a spectrum of ways that you can interpret polling errors. One possibility is that the polls are imprecise, but they're still useful. They'll never be able to nail down whether Joe Biden is going to win Georgia or lose it by four or win it by four. Like they're just not that good, but they're good enough to flag that something happened in Georgia and that's useful to us. Another possibility is that they're so imprecise that they're no longer useful. It's like, all right, we got these polls showing Biden up eight points, but in our political era,

the range of possible outcomes in national elections is pretty tight. In my lifetime, the whole range of results goes from what, Bush plus two in 2004 to Clinton plus eight in 1996. And so if the amount of error in a poll is basically equal to the range of possible results, they may tell us something, but they're just not that useful. In any given election, either side can win and you can't rule out anything and you didn't get that much out of it. Third possibility is that the polls are so wrong that they're counterproductive. They're not just useless, but they give an actively misleading picture of the country that we live in. That would be really bad if true. Okay, so now I need to know, where do you fall

on this spectrum? Imprecise, but directionally useful. Usel, useless but we can live with them, really bad and misleading and counterproductive? Because it feels like for a lot of people, number three is kind of where we may be living right now. Where's your head? I think there are definitely elements of the polling there this year and in 2016 that fall into the counterproductive category. In Ohio and Iowa, Joe Biden decided to spend late parts of his campaign, final stop in

Cleveland on the day before the election. That's outright counterproductive. It's also counterproductive for readers in the electorate. You know, there are cases where political activists make decisions to spend money on long-shot Senate races like South Carolina Senate or the Kansas Senate race or the Alaska Senate race where people just put their energies into the wrong spot. There's also a toll on people's trust in institutions. Polling is an inherently uncertain thing.

And so we do expect to some extent that readers appreciate that, you know, polls can be off and it shouldn't undermine the credibility of other things that we have to say or do, which could be more based on the firmest facts. But I think that it does undermine the credibility of our ability to communicate to readers that we understand the difference between something that we know to be true and something that is a best estimate. But you didn't answer my question. Where do you fall? I'm really, look, I think that-

Sounds like you're torn. I really am torn. I think the alternatives to public polling are pretty bad. I mean, we're just stuck to talk to our neighbors and our like-minded friends. We wouldn't really have any idea of what's happening in the rest of the country, potentially. So that's tough to accept.

Let's revisit this after the autopsy. I mean, if we go through the data and we find that there are things that we can fix, then we'll make those changes and evaluate whether we think we're still in the imperfect but useful category, and then we might continue to do some amount of public polling in the imperfect but useful category. And then we might continue to do some amount of public polling in the future.

But if we conclude that we don't think we can fix these things, then we have a really hard choice, which is whether to abandon the enterprise altogether, which has some important costs, because if you don't have a read on the attitudes of the electorate, you know, I think we're left with alternatives that are not very good. And I think it does matter to understand where the American people are at. I think it's important the way this democracy works. But if we can't get there, then we can't get there. And we would have to reevaluate what we'll do going forward.

Well, Nate, I look forward to hearing what you learn. Thank you very much for your time. Thanks for having me. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. I want to spend a few minutes this morning talking about what we saw last week, where we are now, and where our great country will go from here. In a speech from the Capitol on Monday, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell threw his support behind President Trump's refusal to concede the election and declined to recognize President-elect Joe Biden's victory. President Trump is 100 percent within his rights to look into allegations of irregularities and weigh his legal options. McConnell mocked Democrats for calling on Trump to accept the results of the election,

saying that many of them had never recognized Trump's victory four years ago. That message prompted a scolding from Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. Joe Biden won this election fair and square. Republican leaders must unequivocally condemn the president's rhetoric and work to ensure the peaceful transfer of power on January 20th. But too many, including the Republican leader, have been silent or sympathetic to the president's fantasies. And the drugmaker Pfizer announced that an early analysis of large-scale human testing has found that its coronavirus vaccine is more than 90 percent effective in preventing infection. A highly promising result that could make it a leading candidate for federal approval. The clinical trial is not complete and the results could change,

but so far, the company said, no serious safety concerns have been observed. Pfizer said that it would ask the FDA for emergency authorization for the vaccine later this month. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.