Nervous Democrats got the news they were anxiously dreading this week: The polls are shifting… and they’re shifting toward President Donald Trump.
Liberals have long feared a repeat nightmare of 2016 and after weeks of showing massive leads for Democrat Joe Biden, the polls tightened very quickly over the past week.
And one highly respected outfit in particular — one billed as “America’s most accurate poll” — shows the race is now well within the margin of error.
The famed IBD/TIPP tracking poll – from Investor’s Business Daily and TechnoMetrica Market Intelligence – had Biden up by 8.6 points as recently as Oct. 13.
But boy that changed in a hurry.
This week, the IBD/TIPP poll showed Trump just 2.3 points behind Biden, 48.1 to 45.8.
IBD/TIPP has a reputation when it comes to presidential elections: It was one of only two pollsters to successfully predict the 2016 results.
It was also the most accurate pollster in every U.S. presidential election going back to 2004.
Campaigns pay close attention to it – and the Biden campaign has no doubt spotted another detail that has to have them alarmed: He was previously above the all-important 50 percent mark, hitting 51.9 percent one of their earlier polls.
Now, he’s fallen below it, a warning sign for any candidate.
What’s more, Rasmussen Reports shows Biden’s lead down to just 3 points – and again below 50 percent – while The Hill/HarrisX has Biden up just 4 points.
And the real difference could be bigger – especially in key battleground states.
Pollster Robert C. Cahaly not only accurately called the shocking 2016 results before anyone in the mainstream, but he very specifically was able to point to Trump pulling ahead in the supposed “blue firewall” of Michigan and Pennsylvania days before the election.
Trump, of course, won both as well as Wisconsin, another state that had been expected to go blue.
The three states gave him the margin of victory.
Now, Trafalgar Group is showing the same thing happening again – and in more states.
Cahaly’s polls find a much tighter race in nearly every swing state, including a dead head in Minnesota, which could become the next Michigan.
Minnesota was long considered safely blue, voting for the Democratic candidate in every presidential election since 1972. It even went blue in the 1984 Ronald Reagan landslide – the only state to vote for Walter Mondale (who was from there).
But Trafalgar’s polls show that may be about to change.
Cahaly spoke on Fox News about his polls – and why they show results that others don’t: The mainstream is missing “hidden” or “shy” Trump voters.
“There is a clear feeling among conservatives and people that are for the president that are not interested in sharing their opinions so readily on the telephone,” Cahaly told Sean Hannity.
He said the current toxic environment is making Trump supporters reluctant to come forward.
“We’ve seen people be beat up, harassed, doxxed, have their houses torn up because they’ve expressed opinions that are not in line with the politically correct establishment,” he said.
He said pollsters have to compensate for this – and if they don’t, they won’t get honest answers… or accurate results.
“You end up disproportionately representing the people who will like to talk about politics, which is going to skew toward the very, very conservative and the very, very liberal and the very, very bored,” Cahaly told the National Review. “And the kind of people that win elections are the people in the middle. So I think they miss people in the middle when they do things that way.”
By Cahaly’s estimation, the mainstream pollsters have missed the people in the middle yet again – and the nation could see another big surprise on Nov. 3.
— Walter W. Murray is a reporter for The Horn News. He is an outspoken conservative and a survival expert, and is the author of “America’s Final Warning.”