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Salem, New Hampshire — Everything that everyone says about the New Hampshire Republican presidential primary is shaped by the polls showing Donald Trump far ahead of Nikki Haley. The former president leads the former governor by 19.3 points, 55.8% to 36.5%, in the Real Clear Politics average of polls. There are a few polls that look like outliers, like one showing Trump 27 points ahead. But the cluster of polls showing Trump between 14 and 18 points in the lead looks like it’s the center of things.
Trump, who loved to talk about ratings when he was a television star, loves to talk about polls when he is ahead. He also likes to exaggerate his lead. Lately, though, in both Iowa and New Hampshire, he has displayed some caution about the polls and stressed to his supporters that they must, must, must get out to vote to turn his lead in the polls into a victory in the race.
Haley, like many a candidate in distant second, dismisses the polls. Campaigning Sunday, she pushed back when a reporter asked her to comment on “Trump’s lead only growing in this latest poll.” (That day, the “latest poll” showed Trump with a 19-point lead.) “That’s not true,” Haley shot back, citing “one poll that just came out that showed us 2 points apart. You had another poll that came out that showed us 11 points apart. You had a poll that came out a couple of days ago that showed us even. The only thing that I care about is on Tuesday.”
Well, now it is Tuesday, and we will find out if the polls are right. Haley has not actually said the polls are so wrong that she will actually win. Instead, she said she wants to finish “even stronger” than she did in the Iowa caucuses, where she lost to Trump by 32 points. Given her better position in New Hampshire, where she trails by less than 20 points in a two-candidate race, that should be doable.
But Haley and her staff and her supporters of course hope she can actually win. That would mean the polls are really, really wrong. Is that possible?
Some people around Haley point to polls in the past, in other races, that have been seriously wrong. Everybody can think of some. Remember that Washington Post-ABC News poll in the final week of the 2020 election that showed Joe Biden leading Trump by 17 points in Wisconsin? In the final result, Biden won Wisconsin by 0.63 points, that is 63/100ths of a single point. The poll missed the final result by more than 16 points.
But that was an individual poll. Are polling averages, averaging the results of several polls, ever so dreadfully wrong that Haley could win New Hampshire? I asked Tom Bevan, co-founder of RealClearPolitics, which publishes the most widely cited average of polls in national and state races. Has there ever been a race in which the polling average was as wildly wrong as some individual polls?
“In more than two decades of aggregating polling data, we’ve only seen a few instances where all of the polls were off in a significant way,” Bevan said in an email exchange. “Ironically, one of those was in the Democratic primary in New Hampshire in 2008, where the final average of polls had Barack Obama up by 8.3 points and Hillary Clinton ended up winning by 2.6 points. So yes, it’s possible all of the polls could be wrong, but with Trump’s current lead, it would have to be a miss bigger than anything we’ve ever seen.”
That 2008 New Hampshire miss was 10.9 points. Bevan also noted the 2016 presidential race in Wisconsin, in which Clinton was leading by 6.5 points in the average and Trump won by 0.7 points — a 7.2-point miss. And in the 2010 Nevada Senate race, challenger Sharron Angle was ahead of Sen. Harry Reid by 2.7 points and Reid won by 5.6. That was an 8.3-point miss.
At this moment, the Real Clear Politics average shows Trump leading Haley by 19.3 points. If Haley were to win in a squeaker, say by 0.5 points, that would require a nearly 20-point miss. That would be historic.
So Haley casts doubt on the polls — she has to, for her own morale, for the morale of her team, and for the morale of her supporters whom she needs to get to the polls. What else could she do? “Every losing campaign complains about the polling,” Dave Carney, a longtime New Hampshire-based Republican strategist, said in an email exchange. “When it’s one poll or one outlet’s series of polls, maybe you can make the case they are garbage. In fact, most public polls are trash. But when every poll shows the same trends, the griping comes across as desperate and pure spin to give their supporters hope not to throw in the towel before voting even starts.”
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