The Republican pollster Trafalgar Group just released its first downballot poll of the 2020 general election, and if you're wondering why it's the first poll since the start of the pandemic—and just the third survey ever—to find Republican John James leading in Michigan's Senate race, that's because a highly questionable assumption is powering the firm's methodology.
Trafalgar gained notice after the 2016 elections for being one of the few pollsters to predict that Donald Trump would win the key swing states that proved crucial to his Electoral College victory, including Michigan. The outfit's founder, Robert Cahaly, argued he was able to do so by accounting for so-called "shy" Trump voters—those who, due to an alleged "social desirability bias," are reluctant to tell pollsters that they support Donald Trump.
However, Trafalgar's approach didn't fare all that well two years later. In the dozen polls the firm made public in the last two weeks before the 2018 midterms, nine were too favorable to the GOP, including one that predicted Republican Brian Kemp would win the Georgia governor's race by 12 points (he prevailed by just 1 point). On average, Trafalgar missed by 5 points and outright called three races incorrectly, including the contests for Senate in Arizona and both Senate and governor in Nevada.
Cahaly is nonetheless sticking to his thesis, even though every serious analysis has rejected the notion that these supposedly "shy" Trump voters actually exist. (For more on this topic—and what was really behind the 2016 polling miss—see Huffpost's Ariel Edwards-Levy, CNN's Harry Enten and the New York Times' Nate Cohn.) As a result, Trafalgar sees Trump leading Joe Biden 47-45 and James edging out Democratic Sen. Gary Peters 48-47, a finding at odds even with James’ own recent polling, which had him down 49-44.
Trafalgar could of course be right and everyone else wrong. But even if it succeeded where most others failed in 2016, the opposite obtained in 2018, when the bulk of polling forecast a Democrat landslide—and that's precisely what unfolded.
