What the New York Times Pollsters Got Wrong About Swing State Polls
Democrats shouldn’t freak out—just yet
Since last week, Democrats I have been speaking with are freaking out. After 2016, polling shows that Democrats care more about beating Trump than anything else. His poor approval rating and the growing support for impeachment have given his detractors hope.
But then, on October 25th, the New York Times completed a poll that showed Trump statistically tied with or leading Democratic candidates in the key swing states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Florida, Arizona, and North Carolina. These six states, of course, were the swing states Trump won by the narrowest margin in 2016. If Clinton had won two or three of them rather than Trump, she would be president now and things would be a lot different for sure.
But we live in a world where that did not happen. I live in the swing state of Michigan, in the famous Macomb County. This is the county where pollster Stan Greenberg conducted his famous research, designating my county as the home of the Reagan Democrats, working class voters who abandoned the party of the New Deal for Ronald Reagan’s conservative revolution. This county has been called a “bellwether,” and it voted overwhelmingly for Trump in 2016. It was one of three counties in the country that the Cook…
