Even if Trump loses, he has once again defied the polls

When 2020 started, US President Donald Trump was entering an election year with the wind in his sails; good poll numbers and one of the lowest unemployment rates in US history seemed to make his re-election campaign easier.

Then the coronavirus struck and the race for the White House suddenly opened up. The economy shuttered, unemployment skyrocketed and businesses closed down. Trump’s main selling point became his achilles heel.

The US has also been one of the worst-hit countries with almost 10 million infections and more than 238,000 thousand deaths.

US pollsters and pundits went into overdrive. The US electorate, they reasoned, wouldn’t re-elect a president they deemed to have failed in his handling of the pandemic.

Joe Biden, the Democratic presidential candidate even claimed that the Trump presidency is an aberration “It’s not who we are...not what America is,” Biden has been often quoted saying.

Going into the elections some assumptions were made by pollsters that have not been borne out.

Which candidate benefited from a higher voter turnout? 

Americans this year voted in record numbers.

Almost 100 million voted before election day and some estimates say once in person ballots are counted from election day between 140-150 million people will have voted, or around 65 percent of eligible voters.

Compare that with the 2016 elections where the election turnout was 55.7 percent.

It was widely assumed that a higher voter turnout would benefit Biden, leading to a ‘Blue Wave’ where the Democratic Party would sweep the Presidency alongside the Senate and the House of Representatives.

That hasn’t quite turned out to be the case.

Trump has so far gained 65.4 million votes, an increase of more than 2.4 million from the 2016 election and is on course to surpass the 65.8 million votes Hillary Clinton gained in 2016.

Biden equally has surpassed Clinton’s vote count in 2016 and has so far garnered 67.6 million votes, an increase of 2 million votes.

While it’s important to remember that vote counting is still ongoing, and these numbers are likely to change, turnout alone has also benefited Trump.

Minorities don’t like Trump?

Democrats have long relied on ethnic minorities as one of their core voter bases.

When Biden earlier this year said “You ain't black” if you vote Trump, to many it encapsulated both how important the black vote is for Democrats but also for some, the complacency with which Democrats have tended to treat their black voter base.

Given Trump’s coarse and sometimes even racist rhetoric towards different ethnic groups, many have been surprised to see him increase his share of the vote amongst Black men and women and with Latino men and women. 

Interestingly Trump’s voter share amongst white men, while still, a majority at 57 percent, has seen a decline of 5 percent points from the 2016 elections.

Poll sample sizes are also different this year and not as representative considering that a large chunk of votes is coming from mail-in ballots.

In Florida, which Trump has now won comfortably, it’s in no small part due to the help of the large Cuban and Venezuelan population who bought into Trump’s rhetoric that Biden would turn America into a socialist country.

America’s neat dividing lines about which ethnic group should vote for which candidate on election day proved to be messier then many predicted.

Can we rely on polls again?

The 2016 elections polls gave Trump only a 28 percent chance of winning, the rest is history and many vowed never to trust a poll again.

The 2020 elections have seen pollsters and pundits alike moving between predicting a massive victory for Biden followed by the 2016 caveat. The American electorate hasn’t for the most part disappointed, confounding pollsters and pundits alike.

This year pollsters gave Trump a 10 percent of winning the White House race and that too seems to have been a premature forecast.