By Stuart Stevens

There will be hundreds of polls between now and election day. While the head-to-head numbers will receive most of the attention, in the professional political world, they are considered the least informative. What really counts is the movement inside the polls.

When I first started working in campaigns decades ago, I was lucky enough to work with two brilliant but wildly different pollsters: Robert Teeter and Arthur Finkelstein. Teeter was from Michigan, a quintessentially Midwestern character. As a pollster, he was deliberate, cautious, and precise. As a man, he was forever civil, gentlemanly, and gracious.

Arthur was born in Brooklyn, the son of Eastern European emigree Jews. If you called central casting asking for a combative, wise-cracking New York Jewish stereotype, Arthur would have been perfect. He was famed for delivering polling presentations in his socks, often while standing on a conference table, an untied tie draped around his neck. Though meticulous about his data, he would make broad, sweeping announcements of what he perceived to be the underlying truth of a poll. In one of the first meetings I was in with Arthur, he started by telling the candidate, who was sitting with his wife, “They hate you. Hate you.” She started to cry.

Teeter and Finkelstein were the dominant pollsters on the Republican side from the late ’80s into the next century. Working campaigns with both, they taught me how to read polls. It was a skill and art that I never knew existed. I assumed a poll was just a collection of numbers like a scoreboard, showing who was ahead or behind at any given moment in the game. That’s true but deeply inadequate.

So, looking ahead to the election, here are my thoughts/suggestions on how to drill down into the deeper truths of political polling.

First, pick a poll to focus on. It needs to be one that has publicly available cross tabs because it is in those hundreds of columns where the real meaning of the poll lurks. There is no one way to conduct a poll, and much of the variance in polls is a function of the methodology. The most benefit comes from tracking trends and for that to have meaning, you must have confidence that the poll released two weeks ago was done to the same standards as the numbers that were just released. In this way, polls are like bathroom scales: the number might be slightly off, but the same scale will reveal if you are gaining or losing weight. And it’s trends that matter the most in polling.

The Marist Poll is a good choice. It was started in 1978 at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, New York. It’s now conducted in partnership with NPR and PBS, is accessible at no cost, and provides full and extensive cross-tabs.

Let’s walk through the cross-tabs.

Pay attention to the percentage of Democrats, Republicans, and Independents in the polling sample. The latest Marist has that at 36%D, 33%R, 31%I. This is a function of how people self-identify and will vary based on the ups and downs of the parties, particularly the popularity of an incumbent president. Right after January 6, 2021, Democrats held a nine-point advantage over Republicans. Nine months later, after the Afghanistan withdrawal, Republicans held a five-point advantage. Now, with both Biden and Trump having low approval ratings, the two parties are about equal. Marist also asks, “Are you definitely voting in the election?” Ignore that number. People lie. It means nothing.

Further down is a job approval for the president, broken down by groups. This is interesting and important. Biden has a 41% job approval. Presidential job approval has been a classic indicator of the likelihood of re-election for incumbent presidents, but I think the predictive quality of that number has been greatly diminished by the state of our current politics. Before this coming election, the majority of one party had never believed the president was not a legal president. If I were running a poll, I would ask a screening question, “Do you believe the president was legally elected?” If the answer was no, I’d end the interview and move on. What can you say to that person that will get them to vote for Joe Biden? Hey, I know you think he stole the White House, but how about that infrastructure act?” Take that universe of voters out of the poll, and Biden’s job approval rises to above 50%.

Go down a little further to a breakdown by education and race to find the major faultiness of this election. College grads give Biden a 48% approval, eleven points higher than non-college educated. Trump has a 33% approval with college grads, 47% with non-college grads. Biden wins non-white voters by 11 points, 42-31. Trump wins white voters 49% to 40%.

Keep in mind that the fastest declining large demographic is non-college-educated white voters, and you can see why Republicans are so frantic to change the rules of voting. In 1980, non-college-educated whites were 60% of the electorate. Now they are 39% and dropping. Reagan won a sweeping landslide in 1980 with 55% of the white vote. John McCain lost a not particularly close election with 58% of the white vote.

On page 20 of the cross tabs, there’s a fascinating breakdown of the race's issue terrain. For Biden supporters, the number one issue with 50% of his voters is “Preserving Democracy,” with “Inflation” second at 17%. For Trump voters, the numbers are reversed, with 41% listing inflation as their number one issue and 11% preserving democracy.

Spend time with the Marist cross tabs, and the picture of two very different countries emerges. The Biden campaign gets this. That’s why Biden keeps raising the issue of democracy in big moments: the Valley Forge speech marking the insurrection, the State of the Union, the D-Day speech. If campaigns expect voters to care about an issue, they must prove the candidate cares about it. Joe Biden’s life speaks to the reality that he cares deeply about democracy.
Contrast that with Donald Trump. His voters care about inflation. Does anyone in the universe think Trump even thinks about inflation? Of course not. He’s a candidate of his own anger and grievance.

The hour-to-hour and day-to-day of a campaign is cacophonous and confusing. But it’s the fundamental trends of a race that make the difference. Make a point of spending time with a quality poll, and the noise fades out as a signal starts to emerge. As I’ve written before, the signals tell me it’s better to be the Biden campaign. It’s up to us all to ensure those signals only grow stronger.

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Stuart Stevens