A recent Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll found "48% of registered voters said they would vote against Mr. Trump, no matter who the Democrats choose... 34% said they were certain to vote to re-elect the president, no matter who is nominated as his opponent."
I've been hearing this kind of information used to soothe concerns, to argue that as far as the 2020 presidential race goes, Democrats are doing well and Republicans should be worried. And I admit it fits nicely with the kinds of polling numbers we've been hearing about all along, like approval ratings: in three years Trump has never earned the approval of more than 46% of the country while among Republicans it's never been lower than 74% (and it's often in the 90% range).
Which, of course, shows how deeply divided we are as a nation. Blah, blah, blah.
But as we learned in 2016, our political processes can be full of surprises. Take the Electoral College. Americans don't really vote for the president; they actually vote for a state elector who, as a member of the EC, casts his or her vote based on how they pledged they would. The total number of each state's electors is equal to the number of congresspersons (House representatives plus 2 senators) they send to Washington. In nearly every state it's a winner-take-all proposal, meaning whichever candidate gets the most votes (effectively winning that state's popular vote) gets the entire batch of that state's electors. So margins can be extremely thin and highly geographical based on each state's detailed politics, but it's of immense consequence. Across the four swing states who made the difference in 2016 - Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin - a mere 77,000 voters gave Trump the presidency through this process. More people fit into NFL football stadiums.
That's right. Hillary Clinton earned 3 million more votes than Trump, winning the national popular vote, but he earned 77,000 more votes than she did in the context of the EC. And that's the math that gives you the presidency. In fact NBC's David Wasserman reported back in July that, due to how this funky process coincides with where populations are growing fastest in America, Trump could potentially lose the popular vote next time by as many as 5 million votes yet still keep the White House.
It's six months later (or three years later) and polling still hasn't expanded to include the Electoral College. Why?
It's a deeply unfair mechanism that should be abolished, but until then it's what we're stuck with. And since we know it, we should work with it. Not ignore it. In the information age, where we can use "surgical precision" to calculate voters just as Republicans do when they commit voter fraud by gerrymandering, we should be conducting polls using Electoral College math and geographics.
Since I'm not a polling expert I can't make recommendations based on experience. But whether it's via phone, e-mail, a website or social media, I'm sure we can make determinations based on a participant's district, zip code or even neighborhood to make more precise calculations. And since the number of electors per state is relatively stable, and since we also have past election results to look at, we should be able to get good rough estimates based on hyper-specific locationing.
The most important part, however, is the effort. To not make a smarter effort, to insist on one-dimensional polling that can only translate to the meaningless national popular vote, is to ignore the lessons of the (very recent) past. And, potentially worse, it can create a false sense of security about the election. Remember that mistake?
I hereby call on all media outlets and political institutions to include Electoral College math and geographics in their polling.
Considering the 2020 race and all it involves, and thinking about how we got here, I've come to believe next year will be - more than anything else - a test of how well we learn our lessons from 2016. If we learn them well, it can indeed be a happy new year. Oh, and Happy New Year.