Polls are all well and good, but in recent year’s they’ve got a shaky record

It’s nice to read polls that predict Trump’s going to lose. Even when you’re like me, and you’ve found yourself turned utterly cynical about their ability to predict a single thing, it can’t be said there isn’t an appeal to hearing that everything’s going to work out alright for your political team next year.

But as much as reports that Trump will come out “six points behind”, with his chances “getting worse” all the time, are reassuring, they’re still meaningless. I know that. We all know that. As Trump has shown us, we all like seeing the polls swing in our favour, but when they swing away, we’re tempted to ignore them or consider them somehow fake. We need to make the distinction, however, between a poll that was sabotaged on purpose to sway in one person’s favour, and a poll that was flawed and, with no intention of the creator behind it, ultimately failed to portray the people’s true feelings on the matter.

There are numerous examples of polls sabotaged on purpose, like the Zogby International Poll. It’s Trump’s new favourite, because it consistently puts him in the lead, but as FiveThirtyEight writer Nate Silver noted of the company when it predicted Barack Obama’s approval rating in 2009 to be far below what it really was, the company’s polls have always been subject to “wild fluctuations” and “erratic results”. All of Zogby’s methods are hidden from public view, meaning we can’t tell what’s going on behind the scenes, but when a company consistently downplays the popularity of Democrats and overestimates the popularity of Republicans, we can tell how it stands.

I mention this primarily to separate it from the kind of poll I want to talk about here, which is the flawed poll. This is anyone that draws from a group of people either too small or too homogenous to represent a wider, more diverse population. And by diversity, I don’t just mean race, gender, or any such factors. That also refers to ideological diversity. Consider, for instance, the news story that echoed around a while ago, claiming that Stalin was “more popular than ever” and “more popular than Putin” throughout Russia. Overall, the Georgian General Secretary came off well, with 70% saying he had a “positive role in history”.

That might sound odd to you. It ought to, because this study asked just 1,638 people what they thought, and drew its conclusions from there. Now while it might look like the pollster Levada that conducted the study is again manipulating their data to push a certain narrative, it should be noted that they never claimed to know the feelings of the entire Russian population. The narrative would clearly sell well in the West, so news agencies picked it up and ran with it, with few bothering to explain the sample size being too small to make the poll any kind of authoritative piece. No matter what happened, Levada must be criticised for failing to note in any of their own reports that this issue means they cannot claim to have judged the feelings of the Russian populace at all, apart from the few people they asked directly.

So we have Zogby polls and Levada polls. One fails to judge what people believe on purpose, the other by methodological flaws not properly accounted for. And like I said, it’s Levada polls we on the left need to watch out for. They’re the ones that put Trump behind. They’ve missed out on whole swathes of America that will come to shape the election.

It’s important to understand that modern Levada polls are almost always conducted online. This is the source of their trouble. Two groups of people don’t respond to online polls all that much — the elderly, and those with poor internet access. Read, rural working class. These are the people that (providing they’re white), to use Trump’s words, “like [him] best.” White elderly people have always been at least 50% behind Trump, providing him with key pockets of support, like The Villages, a gigantic planned retirement complex in Florida whose population has stood in lockstep behind the Republic party for many years, with Republicans outnumbering Democrats “two to one.”

As for the white working class, some estimates claim they are “almost as Republican as minorities are Democratic.” Now, while writers pushing the narrative that Trump “seduced the white working class” are doing nothing more than condescending people they likely think of as rural hicks, it’s certainly true that they turned out for Trump, though not in the same was as communities like the Villages did. For one thing, they’re unlikely to have voted in the first place. When sociologist Jennifer Silva went conducting interviews with young working-class people, she found an overwhelming sense of apathy towards politics. With that said, we need to focus on the people that do vote, and when they do, they again have gone solidly for the Trump brand. Some of them did so reluctantly, others with a clear head and heart, but either way, they voted.

And in many cases, these two groups helped to push the swing states in Trump’s favour, pushing his electoral college margin high enough to render his loss of the popular vote utterly irrelevant. The elderly vote in great numbers, while the working class turn out, in areas where there is no liberal metropolis nearby to push back, and let Republicans take power. Our current Levada polls, by going online, don’t pick these people up. Their opinions aren’t properly registered. As a result, when we see that Trump is supposed to be six points behind in the race, we really can’t be so sure of it.

Ask yourself if you really think any of the Democratic candidates being compared to Trump are going to sway the elderly vote. You’ll probably come up short. And if your best bet is Joe Biden, you’ll be struggling for different reasons as soon as you turn the question around and consider the white working class. Bernie Sanders is in with a shot, largely thanks to his popular policies on universal healthcare. But apart from him, the hackneyed appeal candidates like Biden and Buttigieg are making to ‘forgotten America’, by showing up in baseball caps and eating at little local favourite spots, are unlikely to bring out the vote for the Democratic Party.

If you don’t turn these voters around, the “big battleground” states that went Republican by small margins in 2016, that helped to get Trump into the White House — Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and more — won’t swing Democratic. They’re not lost causes, mind you. They can be won back. What’s more, the more solidly Republican states like Texas, as with Beto O’Rourke’s campaign, have shown that when you offer people a decent alternative to stale politicians who have been around too long for their own good, you can rouse your political base and shake up the established order.

But as long as we let these Levada polls dupe us into thinking the contest is already won, enough action won’t be taken to win people over. Forgotten America will remain forgotten. This isn’t an insurmountable problem, not by a long shot. If the Democratic Party chooses a strong candidate with passion for left-wing politics, real anger at the way the country is being run, and genuine populist appeal, and if their 2020 campaign really focuses on these essential voters in a way that Hillary Clinton’s campaign failed to do, then Trump can be a one-term president. Just don’t sit back on your laurels too early.

Remember that almost every poll said Clinton was bound to win. Predictions were also in favour of Brexit being defeated, of Trump losing the Republican nomination, of Joe Biden sweeping to an easy victory in the Democratic primaries, and more. Politics is a volatile sport if nothing else. Tony Blair isn’t right about much, but he was when he said the only certainty in politics nowadays is uncertainty.

I don’t mean to be too depressive. Things are looking up for 2020. Apart from a few odd ones out in the Democratic primary race (I see you, John Delaney, there are so many great candidates who could sweep the floor with Trump. Even if you can’t trust the polls, when so many of them show the president performing worse as an incumbent than any of his predecessors in modern history, that’s clearly telling us something. If I can leave you with anything, it’s this — we, the left, haven’t won yet. We haven’t lost, either. It’s up to us to make sure we get the outcome we want, come next year. And until that time, don’t trust anyone that tries to reassure you, and tell you that everything’s going to work out okay. Chances are, they’re not lying to you, but they probably don’t have all their facts straight either.