Normally, a shoddy 2024 horse-race poll this early in an election cycle wouldn't even be worth mentioning. But congratulations to Emerson College for defying expectations with its latest survey showing Donald Trump besting Joe Biden in a '24 head-to-head, 44% – 41%.
Honestly, it's meaningless. Morning Consult has Biden besting Trump by the exact same margin, 44% – 41%. At this point, there's a million miles to travel before the 2024 general election, so a few points here or there tells us pretty close to nothing.
But in this case, Emerson managed to release a poll that was fatally flawed from the outset and likely shouldn't have been released at all.
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The main problem, pointed out by pollster John Della Volpe and data analyst Tom Bonier, was the fact that the survey put Biden at just 34% with voters under 35.
It also showed Trump beating Biden among the cohort by nearly 6 points. For reference, in 2020 Biden won Gen Z and Millennial voters by roughly 20 points, according to Pew Research Center. Last November, voters under 30 also favored Democratic House candidates by 12 points (53% – 41%), according to AP VoteCast.
At a base level, it simply defies reason that Trump could possibly be faring better with 18- to 34-year-olds than Biden.
Della Volpe, director of polling at the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics, called the discrepancy "problematic."
Bonier more pointedly called BS, saying, "That is not even close to within the margin of error for the subgroup. It's just a bad poll."
Bad enough that any pollster operating with a basic level of integrity probably should have just canned the entire survey rather than making it public. It's one thing to get an outlier result; it's entirely another to know the data informing that result can't possibly be right.
"Despite this," Della Volpe noted, "pollster receives an A- from 538."
For what it's worth, Civiqs tracking of Trump's favorability rating among 18- to 34-year-olds shows him 40 points underwater, 26% - 66%.
But Biden's favorability among the cohort is just 13 points underwater, 40% – 53%.
All of this is simply a reminder as we head into the presidential cycle that last year many pollsters released garbage polls despite their obvious flaws and that aggregators like FiveThirtyEight.com and RealClearPolitics also treated many garbage pollsters (and therefore their garbage polls) as legitimate.
This coming cycle, news consumers must remember that they have agency to only read the pollsters and analysts they trust along with being discerning about who and what they promote. It's also a good moment to reassess which outlets and analysts either proved to be trustworthy or didn’t last cycle and have accordingly made adjustments—or not.
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Election season is already here, and it's already off to an amazing start with Democrats' huge flip of a critical seat in the Virginia state Senate, which kicks off this episode of The Downballot. Co-hosts David Nir and David Beard dissect what Aaron Rouse's victory means for November (abortion is still issue #1!) when every seat in the legislature will be on the ballot. They also discuss big goings-on in two U.S. Senate races: California, where Rep. Katie Porter just became the first Democrat to kick off a bid despite Sen. Dianne Feinstein's lack of a decision about her own future, and Michigan, which just saw veteran Democratic Sen. Debbie Stabenow announce her retirement.