For much of this year, we, like most of Team Blue, have swallowed hard at The New York Times/Siena national polls showing Trump ahead of Biden. But early Friday morning, NYT chief election analyst Nate Cohn penned something that amounted to putting big, fat asterisks by all those polls. He noted that when he crunched the numbers, Trump’s advantage in the NYT/Siena polls is built on voters who aren’t paying much attention to this election cycle.
The polls have shown Donald Trump with an edge for eight straight months, but there’s a sign his advantage might not be quite as stable as it looks: His lead is built on gains among voters who aren’t paying close attention to politics, who don’t follow traditional news and who don’t regularly vote.
Disengaged voters on the periphery of the electorate are driving the polling results — and the story line — about the election.
This is just staggering. We’re well before the point where most legitimate pollsters turn on the likely voter screen, and Cohn is effectively saying that much of Trump’s lead is built on disengaged voters.
Specifically, Cohn noticed that in the last three NYT/Siena polls, Biden leads among those who voted in 2020. He has near-unanimous support among “high-turnout Democratic-leaning voters,” but holds only three-fourths of Democratic-leaning voters who stayed home in 2020. Cohn has been remarkably silent on Twitter, given that—and it bears repeating—he just put huge asterisks by almost all of the NYT/Siena polls from this year.
When former Stars and Stripes managing editor D. Earl Stephens saw this, he hit the ceiling.
Hmmmm … not as stable as it looks, eh?
The Times literally just admitted to turning around shaky information for the better part of a year. This lede is so loaded, I’m surprised Cohn’s desk didn't collapse when he typed it.
“Shaky information” is being kind to it. You would think that somewhere down the line, the folks at the NYT and Siena would have looked at the voting patterns of respondents and weighted more for people who actually voted in 2020.
Stephens was also dumbfounded by what Cohn’s admission says about the NYT’s standard caveat about the limitations of polling so far out from Election Day.
Back in February, the NYT buried this sentence into their loaded polling stories: “The limitations of polling are well known, especially almost a year before an election.”
Now they are telling us in so many words that all those polls they have broken out since then — replete with their “known limitations” — are in fact, limited to the point of being worthless.
It’s hard not to agree with this, either. Didn’t they learn from 2016 what happens when you don’t weigh your samples properly? Stephens and Cohn come to the same conclusion, though—the more people start paying attention to the election and its stakes, the more it helps Biden. All the more reason to open our wallets and GOTV.