2016 isn’t the main reason Democrats don’t trust the polls
Stephen H. Provost
The narrative is consistent: Democrats don’t trust this year’s polls because Hillary Clinton lost even though she led in 2016. It’s the old principle: “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”
This encapsulates part of the problem very well. It’s not the polls Democrats don’t trust, it’s the feeling of optimism that goes along with those strong poll numbers. And to be frank, this was part of the problem in 2016. The final polls that year showed Hillary Clinton ahead by 3.2 percentage points, and she won the popular vote by 2.1 percent.
But even though the national polls were within the margin for error (state polls were further off), Democrats simply couldn’t wrap their heads around the possibility that a crude, belligerent, sexist SOB like Donald Trump could win the presidency. It was, to quote Vizzini from The Princess Bride, inconceivable! So they dismissed it.
As a result, it’s not really the polls they don’t trust, it’s themselves.
Still, it goes beyond even that. When someone knows there’s a lot on the line, they tend to worry more. That’s why athletes who come through in the clutch — with a game-winning drive in the last two minutes, or a basket at the buzzer, or a walk-off home run in the World Series — earn our admiration. We know that if we were in that situation, we’d be nervous, because there’d be so much on the line.
It’s why we get anxious watching a movie scene in which the main character is trying to defuse a bomb. It’s why we don’t worry about being late to a friend’s party but sweat bullets if we get stuck in traffic on the way to a job interview.
The stakes matter.
Every time a new election comes around, candidates try to frame it as “the most important election of our time.” Most of the time, I brush it off as hyperbole. But this time, I’m the one saying it — and so are a lot of Democrats.
Even if they hadn’t allowed the polls to fool them in 2016, I have a feeling they’d still be scared out of their wits this time after seeing Trump run roughshod over our institutions during four years in office. I know I am. It doesn’t matter that the pollsters have made adjustments to improve their accuracy, or that Biden’s margins in this year’s polls are wider than Clinton’s in 2016.
In fact, it has nothing to do with Clinton or 2016 and everything to do with how Trump has behaved since then.
It’s not about the past, it’s about a fear of what could happen in the future.
And with Trump, that’s truly scary.