Name: Polling Expert Amy Walter: An Incumbent President's Job Approval Rating Is A Key Election Predictor
Uploaded: 2020-10-30T20:30:04.000Z
Duration: 9 min 28 s
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Next Tuesday, we will be live over on Showtime.

We're taking the whole caravan over to pay cable for some full frontal nudity for a show we're calling Stephen Colbert's Election Night 2020 Democracies Last Stand Building Back America Great Again Better 2020 folks.

Um, as I was saying over there back in the monologue, the president's message of a co vid in every pot is not pulling great, and things are looking pretty good for Vice President Joe Biden.

Currently, FiveThirtyEight selection projection says the chances of Biden winning the election are 89% and Onley 11% for Donald Trump.

Multiple outlets do predicted Clinton win.

We have The New York Times putting that chance that 80% Donald Trump is not going to be president of the United States.

I continue to believe Mr Trump will not be president.

Who what happened is the election over yet?

You promise yourself after the last election that you would not Pokemon go down that road again.

And I'm not alone with the pre election yips all over the country, Democrats are refusing to allow themselves any smidgeon off optimism, saying they trust no one.

The paranoia is so bad, I can't even pick a mouthwash.

I don't care what four out of five dentists recommend.

Know that I don't Experts say that we need hope for the future to help ward off this anxiety.

However, some Americans say they're too afraid to hope this is likely a protective mechanism in response to the 2016 election.

It feels like we're all Charlie Brown going to kick the football.

But we know what the last second Lucy's gonna give us coronavirus.

Are we trapped in unknowable universe of chaos here, Toe?

Please welcome the national editor of the Cook Political Report and polling expert Amy Walter.

Remind all of us what went wrong in retrospect.

What went wrong with those polling probability predictions, Whatever you wanna call them and how that's all fixed now, right?

So I don't know that I can tell you that everything's fixed and better because pulling in and of itself isn't perfect, right?

We all know that there's error, but I think famous margin of error, famous margin of error that is true and is going all the way back to the seventies.

You know, the FiveThirtyEight folks went back and they looked at this election and compared it to previous elections.

And the average error at the national and state polls was pretty much in line with errors we've seen in previous elections.

Stephen was those, you know, prediction models that gave these numbers, like 88 or 72 or 67 or whatever the different.

Right now at 5 30 eight's Got it 89 you know, 89 out of 100 for Biden 11 The Economist, 94% or 96 or something like that.

I don't think the problem is they're they're probabilities.

I think the problem is the way that we as people try Thio work with probabilities were not always that good about it.

Um, because we tend to focus on that big number, right?

There's an 80% chance that that I can win all of this.

But there's also a 20% chance that that you're gonna lose.

And so I think we spent most of 2016 focused on the 80% or whatever number that was that said Hillary Clinton was gonna win.

And now we're spending all the time on the 20% chance that Trump's gonna win.

Look, I mean, why shouldn't we look at that?

Because by looking at the bigger number, we all got burned.

The silent trump voters that we hear so much about that they're out there, but pollsters can't find them, but they just come out of the woods and vote at the last minute.

So do I believe that polls have a hard time capturing all the people that are going to go out and vote all kinds of people, especially people who don't traditionally come out and vote.

Voters who are embarrassed to tell pollsters that they're going to vote for Donald Trump?

So they hang up the phone or lie and say they're going to vote for Joe Biden?

If you've driven through this country and you see people with flags and banners and lawn signs and all that, they aren't shy about Donald Trump.

They are very proud to tell you that they're voting for him.

It's that they may not end up in a poll because they don't tend to be the kinds of folks who are picking up the phone to talk to pollsters Ortio answer mail surveys or to answer in, you know, an Internet survey so they're harder to find.

But so are other low propensity voters, like younger voters or younger voters of color.

So when we have a turnout as we're expected to have, that's going to go through the roof, all kinds of people are going to show up this year, that may not have voted, um, in the last election.

What polls or what data out there do you trust most to indicate to indicate what may happen on Tuesday and beyond?

Yeah, so I think it's keeping a range of things is really important.

So never picking out just one poll look at averages don't cherry pick.

But the other is I look at the president's job approval rating.

This is what's so different from 2016 right?

And, uh, we know that approval ratings the way that people feel about the job, the president's doing have been pretty predictive in the past for how many votes that candidate that president is going to get in re election or what the margin is going to be in the reelection.

So if you go back and you look at where previous presidents were going into their first term reelection, their final job approval rating was really close to the final vote share that they got.

And this is where Donald Trump has a huge challenge ahead of him right now.

If you look at that, Fivethirtyeight average his job approval rating, on average, is somewhere around 43% and the percent of the vote he's getting right now in that FiveThirtyEight an average is around 43 44%.

So those two things line up and it makes some sense, right that if you like the job that the president's doing, you're probably gonna vote for the president.

If you don't like the job the president's doing, you're probably gonna vote for the other person.

People called me today who should know better and said, Okay, you've got to know something.

I don't I don't know what's happening but you, Amy, you got dumped.