The Election, the Polls, and the Media
Carl Cannon, Washington Editor of RealClearPolitics, talks with Matt about what the polls got wrong, what’s wrong with the media, and whether divided government might actually be a good thing.
On Thursday, Carl Cannon, Washington Editor of RealClearPolitics, joined the podcast to talk about what the polls got wrong, what’s wrong with the media, and whether divided government might actually be a good thing.
Click here to listen to our full conversation.
Here’s a lightly edited excerpt:
Matt: So what do you make of the polls? You guys at RealClearPolitics have the poll average that a lot of people like. But I mean, if the polls are bad, then the poll average is bad, right? I think there are ramifications. It drives media narratives, and it might even drive people to choose to vote or not to vote based on what they think is going to be the outcome.
Carl: Well, look, at RealClearPolitics, our poll average was better than the other competitors out there. I won't name them. I don't mean to run them down, but our our average was the best. Was it perfect? No. And one of the reasons—the reason you cite—was, you know, we're averaging polls. So, what do we do, we have these polls that come in, take Wisconsin, you have this poll come in ABC-Washington Post, in October, [that showed] Biden plus 17? Now that was never going to be right. But it was, in our average. The Trafalgar group, by the way, which is a Republican outfit, they had Biden plus one, which turned out to be right on the money...
Matt: You guys have Trafalgar?
Carl: And we also had ABC-Washington Post, although…I think we I think they took it out. I don't do the full averaging. But, you know, obviously, it skewed things. And I gotta tell you, if this were reversed, Matt, if a conservative newspaper or a conservative news outlet had produced a poll that was 17 points in Trump's favor, it's all you'd hear about “voter suppression, racism, white supremacy, they're trying to hold down the minority vote.” But you know, if you're poll averaging, you still need good surveys. The raw data has to be good, or here, and there you going to be led astray.
Matt: I felt personally angry about the polling and the other the smugness of the attitude that some of the kind of data nerds have. And I can tell you throughout the campaign, I thought the Republicans had a good convention. And then the polls didn't really show any movement. And people, I think, kind of looked at my columns and said things like, “well, we didn't see a poll bump.” And I felt like some of the rioting and the civil unrest might have hurt Joe Biden, but the polling didn't bear that out. But maybe the polling was wrong. How do I even know at this point? And now I just wonder if, maybe when Biden was talking about court packing, when I warned that that was a bad idea, like maybe that actually did hurt Joe Biden.
Carl: Well, that’s right. If you want to take the best look at polling, Joe Biden had a lead of about 10 points, all through the summer—all through the autumn. And then he started to falter in the last two weeks. And what happened was, imagine a horse race. And it’s a mile and a quarter race, and Biden is in the lead. And then on the homestretch, he's far ahead. But he's tiring, which is not a bad metaphor for Biden, because they kept him under wraps, right. He didn't do much. And other horse is closing fast. The polls kind of showed that, you know, the RealClearPolitics poll average nationally, by the end was, you know, six points—not 10 or 11… So the trend line was right, and if you're really paying close attention, you understood that this was closer than most people thought. But I myself was fooled, you know, and I cover this stuff. Ten points. How do you make that up? Now, you could argue [Trump] didn't really make it up. But if it wasn't that big to begin with, were we really giving our readers—you and me, we write all the time I write every five days a week you write a lot—were we giving our readers an accurate view of what was happening this campaign? And I think the answer may be “no,” it's only partially accurate.
Matt: Yeah. And we're taping this Thursday afternoon, the Thursday after the election. And so things are changing. They're still counting votes. But are you concerned about Donald Trump contesting this election? Mark Levin, the conservative radio host is basically calling on Republican legislatures to select electors who would go against the will of their state. How concerned are you that this is going to metastasize into something ugly? Or do you think it's just an election that might take a couple days to sort out?
Carl: Well, it's already taken a couple of days. It's going to take a couple more days. In large part that's dependent on President Trump. You know, Al Gore was bitter about what happened in 2000. He carried the popular vote by about half a million votes at a time we thought that was a lot. He lost Florida and a memorable recount…by, you know, between 500 and 1000 votes out of many millions cast, so that was a hard blow… Gore would speak about that campaign for years. And he began adopting a phrase that Tipper Gore used. He'd say, “the election that we won and the Supreme Court decided we could not serve.” And it was a laugh line. But Gore was serious, and he was bitter. But he finally conceded on December 13. And because of the way he was the Vice President at the time, it actually fell to him to read the tallies in the Senate, and he did it. And, you know, if Donald Trump ends up losing this, even if he fights in the courts and still loses it, I would hope that he would follow Gore's example. But we don’t know what Donald Trump acts like when he loses, because he's run for office exactly twice in his life. And the first time was in 2016. The guy never ran for city council mayor, Governor, Congressman, Senator, you know, even dog catcher. He ran for president, and he won. If he loses, here's a man whose insult to somebody is to say, “you're a loser.” He hasn't shown us these temperamentally equipped to come up on the short end, but if he does, you'd like to think he'd rise to the occasion. And the meantime, the people rioting are not doing Joe Biden any favors.