Don’t be shocked if Trump beats the polls again

If past elections are any indication, former President Donald Trump will outperform the poll numbers, and if that’s the case, he could be headed for a landslide victory in the Electoral College.

On Election Day 2016, Trump was considered a slight favorite to win the state of Iowa. But a week before the elections, the Register of Monks released what was essentially an outlier poll showing Trump winning the state by 7 percentage points over then-Democratic Party nominee Hillary Clinton. The other two polls released that week showed Trump winning by 3 points and Clinton winning by 1. On election night, Trump won Iowa by 9 points, a shocking result for a state that had supported the former President Barack Obama twice.

No other sounder than the Register of Monks recorded such a significant lead for Trump in the month leading up to the election. Without fail, all the polls presented the state as a toss-up that slightly favored Trump.

Four years later, a similar story unfolded. On election day, the RealClearPolitics the poll average gave Trump a slight lead of 2 points. The polls published a few days before the elections all showed the same thing: an impasse that put the State squarely at stake. But not the Register of Monks survey. Once again, this poll shows Trump leading the state by 7 points. And when all the votes were counted, Trump won the Hawkeye State by 8 points.

In either case, this single poll captured what few other pollsters have done: support for Trump was significantly underestimated by conventional pollsters and he was running much more competitively in Midwestern states, in and around the Great Lakes. In 2016, he outperformed his poll numbers in Wisconsin by 7 points, in Michigan by 4 points, and in Pennsylvania by 3 points. He won all three states and the presidency.

In 2020, it was the same story, even though he lost all three states: a 7-point outperformance in Wisconsin and a 2-point outperformance in Michigan. THE CPR the average reached a margin of 1.2 points in Pennsylvania that year.

This brings us to 2024. This week, the Register of Monks released a poll on the presidential race in Iowa, and the results were stunning. Far from the 7-point lead recorded by the poll in 2016 and 2020, Trump now leads President Joe Biden in Iowa by 18 points, third-party candidates included.

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Elsewhere, polls show Trump deadlocked with Biden in Minnesota and Virginia, two states that haven’t voted for a Republican candidate in decades. In the perennial swing states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, Trump enjoys a slight lead over Biden.

But if Minnesota and Virginia are in fact as close as a recent poll indicates, while Iowa is as uncompetitive as the new poll says, recent history suggests that Trump could end up winning the states of the Rust Belt much more than current polls suggest. And in doing so, he will dash any hopes of Biden’s re-election.