In the 2016 Presidential election, the polls were off…way off. Not only did they incorrectly predict that Hillary Clinton would win the election, they predicted she’d win it by a landslide. As we now know, the 2016 election did turn out to be a landslide victory — just not for Hillary Clinton.
Donald Trump captured 306 Electoral College votes compared to Clinton’s 232. It was a result that left pollsters absolutely stunned, wondering how to move forward after their numbers were so far off. Now, with the 2020 election still years from truly being on anyone’s mind, the polls are at it again predicting Trump to be handily defeated in the next presidential election.
Here’s a rundown from PPP, a quite liberal polling company, on how they see 2020 shaping up so far:
“Trump does a lot of losing in our poll. Voters wish that either Barack Obama (53/40) or Hillary Clinton (49/42) was president instead of Trump. Trump loses by wide margins in hypothetical matches against Joe Biden (54/39) or Bernie Sanders (52/39) for reelection. Trump loses 12-13% of the folks who voted for him last fall to either Biden or Sanders. Trump also trails in hypothetical contests against Elizabeth Warren (49/42), Cory Booker (45/40), and Kamala Harris (41/40)”
One Democrat that PPP does have Trump tying with is Facebook billionaire Mark Zuckerberg, whose name some have floated recently as a possible 2020 candidate. In this matchup, the two starkly different billionaires both manage to pull 40% of the vote.
Interestingly enough is the fact that this poll chooses to look mostly at people who are either highly unlikely to run in 2020, or guaranteed not to. Thanks to the Twenty-Second Amendment, we won’t be seeing Barrack Obama on the ballot next election, so comparing his numbers against Trump’s is nothing short of fan fiction. Hillary Clinton’s political career is over — she took way too much damage in the 2016 election for the Dems to ever consider running her again, so, like Obama, comparing her against Trump in 2020 is just left-wing wishful thinking. By the 2020 election, Bernie Sanders will be 79 years old. Sure, he may decide to run anyway, but it doesn’t seem extremely likely.
As for Mark Zuckerberg, the man who claimed that Facebook was going to replace church, there is no real indication whatsoever that he has any desire to run for president. For the sake of the USA and the world at large, let’s hope it stays that way.
Corey Booker and Elizabeth Warren are certainly potential if not likely candidates for 2020, but it is Kamala Harris who has been most outspoken in her intention to run. One fundraiser told The Hill that she is “absolutely” going to run. In fact, she’s already raising money and is arguably currently leading what is shaping up to be a crowded field of Democratic candidates. This means that the one candidate in the current polls Trump may likely end up facing is one who he is in an almost dead heat with — polling odds that are certainly a whole lot better than the ones he overcame in 2016.
So what can people take from this latest round of polling? The answer is not much. If 2016 showed us anything, it’s that polls aren’t even reliable the day before the election is supposed to take place. For elections that are more than three years away, they might as well be using a random number generator.
Even if the polls could be believed to be an accurate representation of the American electorate, there’s still no way they could even begin to accurately predict the outcome of an election three and half years down the road. So much can (and almost certainly will) happen between now and the 2020 election. Trump could do such an excellent job fixing the economy that even Hillary Clinton starts singing his praises. North Korea could get the whole ICBM thing figured out and take over the world. There’s just no way to know short of a crystal ball.
Of course, not knowing never stopped the people conducting the polls, and we can undoubtedly look forward to another three years of them giving it their best (liberally biased) guess. For now, though, conservatives can enjoy the irony of the polls already starting to underestimate Trump yet again.
~ Liberty Planet
