DeSantis Crushes Trump! Wait, Trump Smashes DeSantis! Polls Are Useless Nowadays

Two polls with totally different results were released in just a few days.

One concluded that President Joe Biden would defeat Donald Trump easily in a hypothetical 2024 election matchup. However, he also predicted that Biden would lose to Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida.

The WPA Intelligence survey The January 13th release found that Trump would be defeated by Biden 49% to 41% and DeSantis 42% to 45%, respectively.

A Morning Consult is available a few days later poll In a hypothetical GOP primary matchup, Trump had a 17-point advantage over DeSantis. The poll, released Wednesday, showed Trump with 48% compared to DeSantis’ 31%.

The polls are all over the place — just take a look at the collection of surveys Real Clear Politics. Of course, there are still 656 days until Election Day 2024, so it’s understandable.

However, national surveys on politics have seen a decline in popularity over the past few election cycles. There are many reasons why this is happening, but two are the most important: 1) Many pollsters insist on calling landlines and millions of Americans have long since moved away from them, and 2) many people don’t talk openly about their political views.

ABC News calls Joe Blough from Topeka in Kansas to discuss 2024. If Joe’s a conservative, he might decide not to play along at all, or he might mute his real beliefs and come across as more of an undecided. And if Joe’s got only a cell phone, he might not get a call at all.

What’s more, pollsters often skew the numbers of those surveyed. A poll could take data from 36% Democrats, 29% Republicans and 35% self-described Independents. This can also lead to false findings.

In 2016, the polls proved to be largely wrong. They were close in the popular vote but they missed the mark in swing states like Florida and North Carolina that tilted Trump’s Electoral College.

Pew Research, which produces some very accurate polls, took this survey. look The accuracy of the 2020 polls.

“Most preelection polls in 2020 overstated Joe Biden’s lead over Donald Trump in the national vote for president, and in some states incorrectly indicated that Biden would likely win or that the race would be close when it was not,” Pew wrote. These problems led to some commentators to argue that “polling is irrevocably broken,” Pollsters should not be trusted or respected “the polling industry is a wreck, and should be blown up.”

Pew also identified a serious problem in polls. In 2020, only 67% of eligible voters voted, while the other 80 million Americans did not. But surveys usually just poll Americans, with no concern on whether they’ll actually cast a ballot.

“[N]early all of Pew Research Center’s public opinion polling on issues is conducted among the general public and not just among voters. Nonvoters make up a sizable minority of general public survey samples. In our 2020 post-election survey, nonvoters were 37% of all respondents (8% were noncitizens who are ineligible to vote and the rest were eligible adults who reported not voting).”

“It’s entirely possible that the same forces that led polls to underrepresent Trump voters would lead to the underrepresentation of Republicans or conservatives among nonvoters. Thus, we need to produce two versions of the nonvoting public to go along with our two versions of the voters,” Pew.

So take every poll with a grain of salt — or a whole shakerful. The methodology is getting weaker.

The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

Joseph Curl is a 35-year veteran of politics, having served 12 years as White House correspondent in a national newspaper. For four years, he was the Drudge Report’s a.m. editor. Send tips to [email protected] Follow him @josephcurl on Twitter

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