Your Survival Guy

Preparing your investments and family for when disaster strikes.

Compensation was paid to utilize rankings. Click here to read full disclosure.

Update Nov. 2nd: This Poll Predicts a Trump Win, Do You Know Why?

By

President Donald J. Trump delivers remarks on Protecting America’s Seniors Friday, Oct. 16, 2020, at the Caloosa Sound Convention Center & Amphitheater in Fort Myers, Fla. (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)

Update: 11.2.2020:

Life Comes at You Fast. Slow It Down with My Friday Email. It’s Free.

 

Originally posted October 20, 2020.

National Review’s Rich Lowry’s explains how pollster Trafalgar Group called Trump’s win in 2016 and is predicting a repeat in a couple of weeks by capturing how Americans feel in their hearts. As Trafalgar Group’s CEO, Robert Cahaly explains, not every family has a half-hour to answer questions.

What Cahaly did was find a way to capture the mood of the busy family with a shorter list of questions and to remove the stigma of being judged by their responses—he found respondents don’t tell you what’s in their hearts.

That’s why polling is so hard. Feelings aren’t easy to capture in a poll. That’s why a polling approach like Trafalgar’s, that focuses more on the hearts of the modern American family, is so intriguing.

Lowry writes:

The upstart Trafalgar Group doesn’t see 2020 the same way everyone else does.

The polling aggregator on the website RealClearPolitics shows the margin in polls led by Joe Biden in a blue font and the ones led by Donald Trump in red. For a while, the battleground states have tended to be uniformly blue, except for polls conducted by the Trafalgar Group.

If you are a firm believer only in polling averages, this isn’t particularly meaningful, but if you are familiar with Trafalgar’s successes in 2016, when (unlike other pollsters) it had Trump leading in Michigan and Pennsylvania and, in 2018, Ron DeSantis winning his gubernatorial race, it is notable. Regardless, it’s worth knowing why one pollster is departing from nearly everyone else.

To this end, I checked in with Robert Cahaly, who is predicting a Trump victory, on the latest edition of The Editors podcast. This piece is based on our conversation.

Cahaly was born in Georgia and got involved in politics going door-to-door as a kid. He started a political-consulting firm with some others in the late 1990s. Around 2008, he says, they realized that the polling they were getting wasn’t very good, so they started doing their own. He says they got good, accurate results in the races they were working.

In the 2016 primaries, they started putting out some of their own polls. “Our polls ended up being the best ones in South Carolina and Georgia,” Cahaly says. “So we started studying what it was that made those so different.”

Then there was the breakthrough in the 2016 general election. “We ended up having an incredible year,” he says. “I mean, we got Pennsylvania right. We got Michigan right. We had the best poll in five of the battleground states in 2016. And I actually predicted 306 to 232 on the electoral college. And we went from doing a little bit of polling on the side to that [being] our primary business in about 24 hours. And since then, that’s what we’ve been doing.”

Much of Trafalgar’s approach focuses on accounting for the so-called social-desirability bias. As Cahaly puts it, that’s when a respondent gives you “an answer that is designed to make the person asking the question be less judgmental of the person who answers it.” Cahaly notes that this phenomenon showed up as long ago as the 1980s, in the so-called Bradley effect, when the African-American mayor of Los Angeles, Tom Bradley, underperformed his polling in a gubernatorial race. It has been a hallmark of the Trump era and is one reason other pollsters missed the impending victory of Ron DeSantis over Andrew Gillum in the 2018 Florida gubernatorial race.

“I’ve got to get past what you want to say in public and get to what you really feel,” Cahaly says. “Because what’s in your heart is going to be what’s on that ballot.”

There are a number of methodological differences in how Trafalgar goes about its work.

One is the number of questions on its surveys. “I don’t believe in long questionnaires,” Cahaly says. “I think when you’re calling up Mom or Dad on a school night, and they’re trying to get the kids dinner and get them to bed, and that phone rings at seven o’clock — and they’re supposed to stop what they’re doing and take a 25- to 30-question poll? No way.”

Why does that matter? “You end up disproportionately representing the people who will like to talk about politics, which is going to skew toward the very, very conservative and the very, very liberal and the very, very bored, “Cahaly explains. “And the kind of people that win elections are the people in the middle. So I think they miss people in the middle when they do things that way.”

According to Cahaly, most polls are more than 25 questions. He keeps it between seven and nine, so respondents can answer in a matter of minutes.

Then there is how the questions are asked. “We do not like to do all live calls,” Cahaly says.

This goes back to the social-desirability bias. People with opinions that are unpopular “don’t want to be judged by somebody on the phone that they don’t know.” If this was always true, it’s particularly so now: “They’ve seen all this stuff of people being shamed for their opinion, people losing their jobs.”

So Trafalgar mixes up how it contacts people, and especially wants respondents to feel safe in responding. “We use collection methods of live calls, auto calls, texts, emails, and a couple that we call our proprietary digital technology that we don’t explain, but it’s also digital,” Cahaly says. The point, he continues, is to “really push the anonymous part — this is your anonymous say-so.”

Another factor, is that “conservatives are less likely to participate in polls in general,” he says. “We see a five-to-one refusal rate among conservatives.” That means “you’ve got to work very hard to get a fair representation of conservatives, when you do any kind of a survey.”

Trafalgar also goes about building its list differently. One thing the firm noticed in its polling in the Georgia and South Carolina primary in 2016, Cahaly says, is “people voting who didn’t know how to use the touch machines, people showing up who hadn’t voted in 15 years.”

It went out of its way to build a list including these kinds of low-propensity voters, “knowing,” per Cahaly, “that the other pollsters probably weren’t even reaching out to these people.” The firm has “a fingerprint” of characteristics meant to find these hard-to-identify voters.

Action Line: Don’t you think you should be heard? With the possibility of Trump winning Pennsylvania and then having it stolen, the stakes are too high. Let’s spread the good word.

 

The following two tabs change content below.
My Twitter profileMy Facebook profileMy Instagram profile

E.J. Smith - Your Survival Guy

E.J. Smith is Founder of YourSurvivalGuy.com, Managing Director at Richard C. Young & Co., Ltd., a Managing Editor of Richardcyoung.com, and Editor-in-Chief of Youngresearch.com. His focus at all times is on preparing clients and readers for “Times Like These.” E.J. graduated from Babson College in Wellesley, Massachusetts, with a B.S. in finance and investments. In 1995, E.J. began his investment career at Fidelity Investments in Boston before joining Richard C. Young & Co., Ltd. in 1998. E.J. has trained at Sig Sauer Academy in Epping, NH. His first drum set was a 5-piece Slingerland with Zildjians. He grew-up worshiping Neil Peart (RIP) of the band Rush, and loves the song Tom Sawyer—the name of his family’s boat, a Grady-White Canyon 306. He grew up in Mattapoisett, MA, an idyllic small town on the water near Cape Cod. He spends time in Newport, RI and Bartlett, NH—both as far away from Wall Street as one could mentally get. The Newport office is on a quiet, tree lined street not far from the harbor and the log cabin in Bartlett, NH, the “Live Free or Die” state, sits on the edge of the White Mountain National Forest. He enjoys spending time in Key West (RIP JB) and Paris. Please get in touch with E.J. at ejsmith@yoursurvivalguy.com To sign up for my free monthly Survive & Thrive letter, click here.
My Twitter profileMy Facebook profileMy Instagram profile

Latest posts by E.J. Smith - Your Survival Guy (see all)

Recent Posts from YourSurvivalGuy.com

It’s California vs. Florida in the Big State Debate

On Thursday, November 30, Fox News and the station’s primetime personality, Sean Hannity, will host a debate between California Governor Gavin Newsom and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. Isabella Simonetti explains the debate in The Wall Street Journal, writing: They aren’t running against each other. Still, Ron DeSantis and Gavin Newsom will take their fiery feud to Fox News this […]

Shiffrin Brings It Home with World Cup Win at Killington

You have read about the amazing career of competitive skier, Mikaela Shiffrin. Last time she appeared on YourSurvivalGuy.com, she had notched her 87th World Cup win. It was already safe to put Shiffrin in the GOAT category of athletes near Tom Brady, Michael Jordan, and Michael Phelps. No one has ever dominated skiing the way […]

Prepare for Solar Storms in 2024

The sun experiences solar storms in a roughly eleven-year cycle, and according to scientists, that cycle could peak next year. The peak of this cycle, called the “solar maximum,” has the potential to hit the earth with solar storms that can damage satellites and even electronics on the ground. Jonathan Chadwick reports for the Daily […]

Can the Supreme Court Stop Wealth Taxes Before They Start?

You probably haven’t heard of Moore v. United States, a little-known case working its way through the courts that could have major implications for America’s savers and business owners. The case revolves around the government’s power to tax unrealized gains. These are gains on assets that an owner hasn’t locked in yet, and which could […]

Families Can’t Save Enough

American households are the least prepared they’ve been in a decade to cover an unexpected $2,000 expense. That’s a sign that inflation and slow wage growth have hurt the ability of Americans to save. Bloomberg’s Alexandre Tanzi reports: The ability of US households to cover an unexpected $2,000 expense is at the lowest level in […]

Biden’s Inflation Blame Game

First, it was the “Putin price hike,” now Biden is blaming inflation on corporate greed, an old and tired excuse. CNBC reports: President Joe Biden took aim at corporations Monday for charging prices he said were artificially high even though the rate of inflation has slowed and some shipping costs have fallen. “Any corporation that has not brought […]

Are Investors Ready to Pounce?

Investors waiting to pounce? Not buying it. They finally have rates they can sink their teeth into. They’re in no rush to take on more risk. At least, that’s not what they’re telling me. In The Wall Street Journal, Jack Pritcher suggests investors are looking for more risk. He writes: Stocks and bonds have surged […]

Disney Signals Problems with the ESG Agenda

You have read about Disney’s war against Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and parental rights. Now, it appears that Disney is realizing the error of getting involved in America’s culture wars in order to boost its ESG rankings. Johnathan Turley writes in The Hill: In recent filings, Disney appears to acknowledge that Smith’s invisible hand is […]

Biden Gave Americans 10 Years of Inflation in Only 3

Americans have endured a decade’s worth of inflation during the three years Joe Biden has lived in the White House. Bloomberg’s Reade Pickert and Jennah Haque report on the cost-of-living squeeze Americans are suffering through today, writing: After years of inflation, US consumers are shouldering a burden unlike anything seen in decades — even as […]

Happy Black Friday

You know how Your Survival Guy feels about money: save a third, spend a third, pay taxes with a third. Well, today, let’s focus again on the spending. One of the best ways to keep you motivated and in the game is to take some trips every now and then. Life Comes at You Fast. […]

Which Jimmy Buffett Album Is Your Favorite?

This year, America lost one of its best-loved musicians, Jimmy Buffett. Over his career, Buffett released 32 albums, and Al Shipley at SPIN Magazine has ranked them, writing: Shortly before his death in September at the age of 76, Buffett finished his 32nd studio album Equal Strain on All Parts, backed by his longtime Coral Reefer […]

More Americans than Ever Own Guns

You have probably heard the phrase “voting with your wallet.” When it comes to the Second Amendment, that’s exactly what Americans are doing. More Americans own guns than at any time since polls began back in 1999. Today, 52% of Americans report owning a gun or living in a household that owns a gun. Alexandra […]

Happy Thanksgiving!

When the pilgrims of the Mayflower landed, many of the men signed the Mayflower Compact, which read: In the name of God, Amen. We whose names are underwritten, the loyal subjects of our dread Sovereign Lord King James, by the Grace of God of Great Britain, France, and Ireland King, Defender of the Faith, etc. […]

Preparing You and a Loved One for Thanksgiving

Your Survival Guy’s here to help you prepare for Thanksgiving dinner. Not with the turkey, stuffing, or desserts but with the conversation. We all know the third rails of holiday conversation: religion, politics, and money. And not in any particular order. I think politics and religion have worn everyone out and are only brought up […]

The Next Ronald Read? Save Til It Hurts

You read the story of Ronald Read in Richard C. Young’s Intelligence Report. The Brattleboro, VT gas station attendant amassed an $8 million portfolio of investments by the time of his death in 2015 at age 92. While Read was stacking stock certificates on the west bank of the Connecticut River, just across the Brattleboro […]