Biden beats Trump, marginally trails DeSantis in new GOP poll

Florida Gov. DeSantis is emerging as a bigger potential threat to President Biden than former President Trump, polls indicate.

Though he’s not as well-known to voters overall, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is emerging as a bigger potential threat to President Joe Biden than former President Donald Trump, according to a new nationwide poll conducted for the conservative Club for Growth.

The poll shows Trump losing to Biden 41-48% — an 8-percentage point disadvantage for the Republican that’s outside the poll’s 3-point error margin. But in a head-to-head matchup against DeSantis, Biden gets 42% of the theoretical vote compared to 45% for the Florida governor, which is essentially a statistical tie, the online survey of 1,035 voters from WPA Intelligence shows.

The poll follows a Suffolk University survey last month that also showed DeSantis marginally beating Biden.

To test people’s knowledge of the candidates, WPA Intelligence used a relatively novel approach in its survey by showing voters a picture of each of the three politicians and then asking respondents to either type the name of the man from memory or click an option acknowledging they didn’t know who they were. Both Biden and Trump were known to 98% of the electorate each; but only 64% knew who DeSantis was.

Yet despite that name ID deficit, the 44-year-old DeSantis still out-performed the 80-year-old Biden and the 76-year-old Trump.

“Of all the three candidates, DeSantis is the one who has room to grow … and yet he still has high favorable, he still beats Biden, whereas Trump loses to him,” David McIntosh, the president of the Club for Growth, told NBC News. “As more people start to recognize DeSantis, his face, there’s a lot of upside for him to grow and get stronger.”

More bought and paid for propaganda: They seek to end the populist vote, no body blievs any polls except the MAGA internal polling.

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In the weeks leading up to the November 2016 election, polls across the country predicted an easy sweep for Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. From Vanuatu to Timbuktu, everyone knows what happened. Media outlets and pollsters took the heat for failing to project a victory for Donald Trump. The polls were ultimately right about the popular vote. But they missed the mark in key swing states that tilted the Electoral College toward Trump.

This time, prognosticators made assurances that such mistakes were so 2016. But as votes were tabulated on November 3, nervous viewers and pollsters began to experience a sense of déjà vu. Once again, more ballots were ticking toward President Trump than the polls had projected. Though the voter surveys ultimately pointed in the wrong direction for only two states—North Carolina and Florida, both of which had signaled a win for Joe Biden—they incorrectly gauged just how much of the overall vote would go to Trump in both red and blue states. In states where polls had favored Biden, the vote margin went to Trump by a median of 2.6 additional percentage points. And in Republican states, Trump did even better than the polls had indicated—by a whopping 6.4 points.

Four years ago, Sam Wang, a neuroscience professor at Princeton University and co-founder of the blog Princeton Election Consortium, which analyzes election polling, called the race for Clinton. He was so confident that he made a bet to eat an insect if Trump won more than 240 electoral votes—and ended up downing a cricket live on CNN. Wang is coy about any plans for arthropod consumption in 2020, but his predictions were again optimistic: he pegged Biden at 342 electoral votes and projected that the Democrats would have 53 Senate seats and a 4.6 percent gain in the House of Representatives.

Scientific American recently spoke with Wang about what may have gone wrong with the polls this time around—and what bugs remain to be sorted out.

[An edited transcript of the interview follows.]

How did the polling errors for the 2020 election compare with those we saw in the 2016 contest?

Broadly, there was a polling error of about 2.5 percentage points across the board in close states and blue states for the presidential race. This was similar in size to the polling error in 2016, but it mattered less this time because the race wasn’t as close.**

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https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-polls-were-mostly-wrong/

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(** My addendum: It was not as close because the vote was fraudulent in 5 swing states.Polls were part of the fraud effort.)

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