USC Pollster: Our Experimental but Accurate Model Shows Trump Winning the Electoral College Again
. . .[T]he previous six Keystone State polls gave Biden an average lead of 5.5 points (though another right-leaning pollster also shows Trump surging ahead). Trafalgar’s chief pollster told me that part of their “secret sauce” is asking questions that reduce the impact of “social desirability bias” in respondents’ answers. The idea is that given the loud opposition to Trump across much of mass media and other taste-making institutions, some people may not want to admit to a stranger over the phone that they plan on voting for him. Part of the way Trafalgar tries to home in on someone’s true intentions is to ask them more indirect questions that may reveal their actual preferences. As it turns out, USC’s pollster has been doing something similar for a number of years, and here’s what they’ve found:
From our previous research on social judgments, we learned that people seem to know their immediate social circles quite well. Their answers about the distribution of income, health status — even the relationship satisfaction of their friends, family and acquaintances — were often in the right ballpark. And when we averaged the data from their responses across a large national sample, it provided a surprisingly accurate picture of the overall population…in all five of the elections in which we tested this question, the social circle question predicted election outcomes better than traditional questions about voters’ own intentions. These five elections were the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, the 2017 French Presidential election, the 2017 Dutch Parliamentary election, the 2018 Swedish Parliamentary election, and the 2018 U.S. election for House of Representatives. In both the U.S. elections, the social-circle question predicted national and state level results better than the “own intention” question in the same polls. In fact, data from the social-circle question in 2016 accurately predicted which candidate won each state, so it predicted Trump’s electoral college victory…
Five for five thus far. So what is their data showing this year? Their traditional polling model gives Biden a double-digit lead in the national horserace, pointing to an easy win and a brutal GOP night. But their “social circle” data, which “predicted outcomes better than traditional questions” is telling a different story:
When we calculate how many electoral votes each candidate could get based on state level averages of the own-intention and social-circle questions, it’s looking like an Electoral College loss for Biden. We should note that our poll was not designed for state-level predictions, and in some states we have very few participants. Even so, in 2016 it predicted that Trump would win the electoral vote.
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