A Michigan congresswoman said she’s been “literally begging” fellow Democrats not to believe polling that suggests President Donald Trump is poised for a big loss in November.
Elissa Slotkin, a moderate first-term Democrat who flipped a longtime Republican district that went for Trump in 2016, told Politico in a magazine feature published on Friday that she “doesn’t believe” the polls.
“I think they’re inaccurate,” she said.
Slotkin, a former CIA intelligence analyst and Iraq War veteran, said her campaign pollster once told her the Trump vote was “fundamentally undercounted” ahead of the last presidential election.
The experts “screwed up in 2016,” she said, and, “I believe that same thing is happening right now.”
“I don’t for one minute think this [presidential] race is safe in anyone’s column,” she said. “I’ve been literally begging people to ignore those polls.”
The polls are even worse for Trump than they were in 2016.
- Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, has consistently polled nearly 10 points ahead of the president in national polls and was recently found to have big leads in six swing states.
- Trump and his team, while publicly defiant, have privately accepted that he’s losing, according to reports.
But Slotnick’s fears are backed by at least one prominent expert, and his forecasting model has an impressive track record.
- Helmut Norpoth, a professor of political science at Stony Brook University, has given Trump a 91 percent chance of winning a second term.
The model — which relies largely on primary performance, not on opinion polls — famously called Trump’s upset victory in 2016.
- It has correctly predicted five of the past six elections, and applied retrospectively, would have been right on 25 of the 27 elections since the primary era began in 1912, Norpoth has said.
“My forecast is unconditional and final,” he told We'll Do It Live. “The polls don’t faze me.”
