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Right now, one of the biggest stories in the news relates to a Fox News poll that shows former vice president Joe Biden leading President Donald Trump by several percentage points. The numbers are grim, to be sure: they’re well above the margin of error for such a survey.
The survey was even taken during the period that Kamala Harris was announced as Biden’s running mate, meaning that respondents were seeing the full picture of the candidate.
And yet, conservatives don’t seem too concerned with these numbers. The president’s still doing his thing, Mitch McConnell is still running the Senate and Republicans seem optimistic about November.
The general consensus seems to be: assuming Democrats don’t try to steal the election with voter fraud, things should be alright. Why are Republicans so relaxed about this?
Because Hillary Clinton was leading in the polls in 2016, too.
It’s entirely possible that Donald Trump loses the election in November. However, polls alone aren’t going to point to this. Polls aren’t studies of the entire population, they’re based on samples.
From those samples, researchers can draw conclusions about the population as a whole. This is where things can break down from reality.
In 2016, something polls missed was white people without college degrees. This demographic turned up in droves for Trump. Should a similar sampling error take place in 2020, it could once again give Democrats a false sense of security going into what is certain to be a tough race.
However, Trump doesn’t even need to win the hearts and minds of a majority of Americans.
The worst-kept secret in Washington DC is that you don’t have to win the popular vote to be the president, you have to win the Electoral College. And this, of course, causes some odd things to happen with tightly-contested races.
It’s not an argument of whether Trump is more popular than Biden. Those numbers are clear: on a national level, Donald Trump tends to be unpopular. However, in the areas where the president has support, that support runs deep.
This is important for winning in the bizarre and often confusing math of the Electoral College. The commonly-shared meme about how someone in Wyoming gets a vote that’s worth about 3.4 people in California? That’s true.
And, for Republicans, that’s a good thing. A Republican is unlikely to ever win California, or New York. However, in states that are deeply Republican, the rules of the Electoral College allow them to remain competitive.
