Michael Dukakis is here to remind you why to stop overreacting to the recent election polls
For anyone, particularly Democrats, panicking or surveying property in Canada over the latest Donald Trump-Hillary Clinton general election polls, Michael Dukakis would like you to know something.
General election polls, according to Dukakis, at this stage in the race “are absolutely worthless.”
And he would know.
“Unfortunately,” said the 1988 Democratic presidential nominee in an interview, “mine was a classic case of where in fact they proved to be way off.”
Flying high out of the 1988 Democratic National Convention, the forecast looked sunny for the then-Massachusetts governor. A Gallup general election poll released July 26, 1988 gave Dukakis a 17-point lead over George H.W. Bush, the Republican nominee.
In fact, Gallup polls from May into August had Dukakis ahead against Bush, the sitting vice president, by comfortable margins. But Dukakis says he didn’t put much stock in those polls, and he recommends that others do the same.
“What’s going on in May has very little to do with what’s going on in October,” he said.
A weekly NBC News tracking poll Tuesday, which showed Trump and Clinton within the margin of error if the election was held today, was the latest in a string of recent polls finding the likely fall general election matchup neck-and-neck, despite conventional thought that Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, would face an uphill battle due to historic unpopularity as well as steep demographic and electoral disadvantages.
Dukakis drew parallels from his situation to what we are seeing now. Trump benefits from having just recently clinched his party’s nomination, he said, while the Democrats have yet to fully coalesce around Clinton, as Bernie Sanders continues to fight on ahead of the cluster of June 7 primaries, including in California and New Jersey.
“When I was allegedly 15 points ahead, I never was really. It was because I had come off a pretty impressive primary victory,” the 82-year-old former governor said, adding, “You’re obviously going to get a bit of a bounce if you win, and I’m sure [Trump]’s getting that kind of a bounce, since he’s won the thing.”
According to research by Robert Erikson and Christopher Wlezien, it isn’t until the polling shifts following both parties’ nominating conventions that those numbers tend to stick. Based on that research, Dartmouth political science professor Brendan Nyhan says conventions represent a “key post-primary turning point.”
“By that point, the polls are almost as predictive as they will be at the end of the campaign,” Nyhan wrote last year for The New York Times blog The Upshot.
As Erikson and Wlezien concluded, “poll numbers do not fade but instead stay constant post-convention to the final week.”
Of course, in 1988, Dukakis’s campaign never recovered following the Republicans’ convention, which was held a month later in August. The subsequent Gallup poll showed Bush leading Dukakis 48 percent to 44 percent, and the vice president never looked back, winning by the popular vote by nearly 8 percentage points (and even more dramatically in the Electoral College).
As Nyhan wrote for the Columbia Journalism Review, conventions remind partisans “who have strayed from their core views what they really believe” and have a persuasive affect on independents who are not loyal to either party.
Dukakis thinks those two points will be particularly prescient come this summer. Not only will most Bernie Sanders supporters come around to back Clinton, he says that effective messaging by the Democrats will hammer away at Trump’s policy proposals and “phoniness.”
The former Democratic governor specifically went after Trump for proposing concealed carry to be legalized nationally, despite imposing gun bans at many of his hotels and resorts. Dukakis also blasted the Republican’s suggestion that the terrorism attacks in Paris could have been stopped if French citizens were armed.
“Is he crazy?” Dukakis said. “I mean, can you imagine a dark concert hall with thousands of people, all of them armed?”
The governor also called out Trump for the recent revelations that, despite calling global warming “a total hoax,” the real estate mogul has cited global warming and the consequential rising sea levels in his application to build a sea wall to protect his golf resort in Ireland.
“The guy is not only nuts, but he’s a phony,” Dukakis said. “He doesn’t really believe this stuff. And I think it’s important that that be exposed.”
Dukakis calls the 2016 election a “tough, but winnable fight” and says Democrats need to employ a 50-state, 200,000-precinct campaign. In the same vein of Elizabeth Warren, he says the Clinton campaign needs a bench of eight to 10 credible, high-profile surrogates to “systematically” take on Trump, as well as the economic effects of recent Republican presidencies.
“This is a huge opportunity for my party, but we got to take advantage of it and we have to take it seriously,” Dukakis said. He later added: “The press unfortunately is just obsessed with this polling stuff.”
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