Bush Campaign Exec Says All Bets Are Off for 2020 Forecasts: ‘Nobody Knows Anything’
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All bets are off when it comes to predicting whether President Donald Trump or Democratic nominee Joe Biden will prevail in the 2020 presidential election, according to a former top campaign official for President George W. Bush.
“All the data — and every model and prediction based on them — are overshadowed by unusual factors that create enormous uncertainty,” Mike Shannon, who worked as a pollster for the Bush White House and oversaw media purchases for Bush’s 2004 presidential campaign, wrote in a Wednesday op-ed for The Washington Post.
“First, we’ve had no real general election campaign yet. Most of the season has been postponed because of the coronavirus pandemic,” he added. “Trump has had just a handful of his beloved rallies. Biden has mostly stayed at home. The in-person conventions were canceled, replaced by virtual conventions that recorded a collapse in voter interest … and that were virtually bounceless, the first time in modern history when neither candidate appeared to get a bump. In this campaign-less campaign, Trump has been the only player on the field, which has been to his detriment.”
Election prognosticators have issued wildly divergent predictions for the 2020 election. Stony Brook Professor Helmut Norpoth — who has correctly predicted five out of six elections since 1996 — has estimated a more than 90 percent chance that Trump will win. American University Professor Allan Lichtman — who has correctly predicted all but one election since 1984 — has said Biden will win. (Lichtman told Mediaite in a Thursday email: “My forecast for a Trump loss has not changed. However, I am worried about voter suppression and Russian intervention.”)
“Even as an abbreviated season gets underway, a dense fog is covering the playing field, making both the ground game and scoring difficult,” Shannon added. “No one knows how the pandemic will affect voter turnout or the actual casting of ballots. This is a big deal for forecasting and polling — an everything deal when swing-state poll margins are within five points, which is where most are today. Moving turnout share just a few points here and there among Republicans and Democrats could have changed three of the past five presidential outcomes.
He also pointed out that voters were shifting in certain states, most notably Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, which voted for Trump in 2016. “Historical patterns lose their predictive value in times of political, informational, economic and cultural disruption,” Shannon wrote.
“We will know more about 2020’s contours after the debates,” he added. “And once the Election Day fog clears, it’s possible we’ll look back with hindsight and think it was all so obvious. Until then, view each prediction and forecast skeptically. Many of the maps drawn today will be just as wrong as my own from 20 years ago.”
