Dave Wasserman is a polling expert with Cook Political Report and he specializes in district-level polls in the United States. This level of polling is important because it often includes the groups that fall through the cracks, it offers a more precise and telling result. That isn’t the only thing going for this poll guru, though. He is also a nonpartisan analyst, which gives him access to more data to work with. Wasserman had some key predictions he made ahead of the 2016 Presidential election and the data he is collecting now for 2020 is singing a different tune.
Final weeks of 2016: massive Dem denial about district-level polling that showed Trump breaking through (see replies to this tweet).
Final weeks of 2020: massive Dem paranoia, even though district-level polling consistently shows Trump running well behind his ’16 margins. https://t.co/2oAGSUfRU1
— Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) October 19, 2020
Wasserman recently had an interview with Greg Sargent of the Washington Post and he started by explaining the place we were in during the 2016 election, “In 2016, district-level polling in late October showed flashing red warning signs for Clinton in districts dominated by White non-college voters,” he states. “It wasn’t being detected so much in state-level polling, because the state polling chronically under-sampled those voters.”
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Wasserman goes on to explain the consistent pattern he sees working against Trump:
Trump is underperforming his 2016 margins by eight to 10 points in most competitive districts. If Trump won a district by three last time, he’s probably losing it by six this time. It’s a pretty consistent pattern.”
Trump lost the popular vote in 2016 but stole the election by winning the Electoral College, but the data he faces now from the same statistician that observed how he even got as far as he did back then is grim. The interview finishes on this note about Trump’s campaign:
Trump needs to boost turnout of non-college Whites by five points nationally, just to offset their declining share of the population since 2016. But he also needs to increase the share of those voters he’s winning,” said Wasserman. “Trump’s gains among non-Whites can only get him so far, because there’s really not much of a Hispanic vote in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. So he’s got to solve this riddle with both persuasion and turnout. He needs to persuade more White voters — both college and non-college — to stick with him. And he really needs to boost non-college White turnout.”
Thankfully, it doesn’t look like him repeating the same antics can sway anyone new to his side, and with the final ten days of the election upon us, he might not have a chance to recover.
Featured image via Political Tribune Gallery
