‘People are acutely aware of the effects that polls have on elections’

Trende is the senior elections analyst for RealClearPolitics.com, the Internet’s go-to website for political junkies and industry insiders.

It’s here that the 41-year-old former lawyer delivers his unique brand of history-infused, data-heavy analysis of the public opinion polls and what they might reveal about the course of a campaign and an upcoming election.

It’s a job that keeps him busy, especially in age where political polling proliferates and partisans on both sides have taken to arguing over whether a survey is unfairly “skewed” in one direction or another. Trende also is a senior columnist for Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball and a co-author of the Almanac of American Politics.

Less than two weeks before the midterm elections, the Washington Examiner caught up with Trende by telephone and asked him about the influence of the RealClearPolitics.com polling average, the confusion over how to interpret survey data and what he’s learned from this midterm campaign. The interview was edited for length and clarity.

Washington Examiner: Where are you based, and how did a lawyer get into the political forecasting business?

Trende: We’re in [Columbus,] Ohio, which has its pluses and minuses. It’s bad not really being in with the Beltway crowd — but it’s good not being in with the Beltway crowd, because I don’t really get a lot of the groupthink. When I got my juris doctorate, I got a master’s in political science along with it, and during the 2004 elections, I just kind of thought, well, I think I can do a better job than people are doing.

Examiner: Has the volume of polling changed the nature of polling analysis?

Trende: Absolutely. You couldn’t really have done RealClearPolitics in say, 1988, when there were only three pollsters and they were releasing polls every other month on the horse race, because the average would be meaningless — and then you’d get a poll two weeks before the election. So the spread of polling has definitely enabled sites like RealClearPolitics. The trick is — I think you said everyone and their mother has a poll now — and that’s kind of a pro and a con. Because we knew ABC[and the Washington Post], we knew they were putting in big amounts of money and hiring people who knew what they were doing. But some of these newer pollsters, we don’t know what to do with them because we’ve never heard of them.

Examiner: How do all of these polls affect respondents and the data? People are getting a lot of calls.

Trende: I was in Ohio for 2012 and I got poll calls like every third day, and it got annoying for me and I do this for a living. Especially with the spread of robo-pollsters instead of live voices. I think if you ask any pollster what the No. 1 problem is with polling today, they’ll say declining response rates. We’re talking like 5, 10 percent of people are answering a survey. So, I think the glut of polling probably does play into that. There are other factors, like cellphones and caller ID. But the simple fact that the first poll is kind of fun to take, but by the 10th one I’m pretty annoyed.

Examiner: How does absentee and early voting impact your ability to gauge what’s happening and what’s going to happen?

Trende: People lie to pollsters about whether they voted early. That is clear. We’ll see a pollster report that 40 percent of the sample says they already voted, and then the secretary of state releases numbers and it’s really 20 percent. It’s not a huge problem, but you can envision scenarios where it might be a problem. But the bottom line is that a lot of this was discussed in 2012 and it just didn’t affect it.

Examiner: What about the issue of “skewed” polls?

Trende: There’s a bunch we could talk about there. Part of the reason we don’t include campaign polls or campaign committee polls is because I do think people kind of mess with the game a bit. People are acutely aware of the effects that polls have on elections and campaigns and fundraising, and they actually take steps to try to massage the poll averages as a result. Now in terms of unskewing the polls, which is not just releasing your own favorable polls to try to change the narrative, but actually looking at public polls and saying, “Well, we think this should be really weighted three points more toward the Republican for whatever reason.” Again, I don’t think it’s accidental that the people who were doing the un-skewing in 2012 were Republicans, and this cycle they’ve tended to be Democrats.

Examiner: Partisan data versus public data: All things being equal, which do you prefer?

Trende: All things being equal, there’s no reason to prefer partisan data over public data. The question is: Are all things equal? Nate Silver has looked into it and found that these campaign polls have a pretty substantial skew in the direction you would expect.

Examiner: Auto-dial versus live-caller polls?

Trende: When I started, people were very skeptical of auto-dial polls. And then Survey USA, and then Rasmussen, nailed the 2002 and 2004 elections, and people said: “Wow, this seems to work.” But then we started seeing the rise of cellphone-only households, which really does now seem to have reached a critical mass. They can’t be reached by auto-dialers, and it’s probably getting to the point that they can no longer weight around it. So, I think you probably need to have some type of live-caller now that can reach these cellphone households. But the big question is Internet polls, whether they are an acceptable end run around [traditional polling.]

Examiner: The RealClearPolitics.com polling average has become ubiquitous. Has that had an impact in and of itself?

Trende: RealClearPolitics shines the light on the polls. Do we change the polls by doing that? … We disseminate them to a broader audience. It’s not just [newspaper] subscribers who know what a [newspaper’s] poll says, it’s the entire country. One of the most exciting things for someone like me is that the number of people in the country who can name the top five Senate races has increased exponentially — several orders of magnitude since I started. It’s exciting for me. But I would imagine for a campaign, that’s stressful and dispiriting.

Examiner: What is one of the biggest misconceptions about polling?

Trende: People feel like, “Oh, the pollsters are making it up.” Or, “How can you possibly forecast based on 500 people?” I think that’s kind of like the peasant cleverness response to polling. But the answer is, there’s real math behind it. What the data gives you isn’t necessarily the right answer; but it is the best answer.

Examiner: How much of polling is data versus art?

Trende: I’m going to split the horns of your dichotomy. It used to be more pure science but it isn’t any more. But I don’t think it’s art. I think it’s a skill. Which is to say, there’s no firm proof, in the mathematical sense. At the same time, though, there are certain types of knowledge that, if you do it enough times and gain experience in a certain state, you start to understand what the underlying patterns are. It’s not the same as science, but it’s closer to that than an art.

Examiner: How much do candidates and campaigns matter versus the political environment?

Trende: We’re seeing a breakdown of that. That was much more true a decade ago than it is today. [Sen.] Mary Landrieu [D-La.] hasn’t run a bad campaign, and by all accounts [Sen.] Mark Begich [D-Alaska] is running a quite good campaign. And you would see those types of candidates win routinely, even in bad years. But it just doesn’t seem to be the case anymore.

Examiner: What kind of a midterm cycle do you think this has been? Does it compare to any campaign in recent history?

Trende: You don’t find presidents who get two wave midterm elections going against them. And so that’s what I think the significance here would be. I mean, Bill Clinton did not have a bad sixth year, but he had a bad first year. George W. Bush had a bad sixth year but he had a good first year, so that’s what’s unusual here is Barack Obama getting hit twice, if it happens.

Examiner: What is the most interesting thing you’ve learned from this campaign?

Trende: Nate Silver after the 2010 elections had a piece that I kind of dismissed at the time, calling it an “aligning” election. Not a realigning election, but an election where the district came into line with national factors. And now I look at that and it’s pretty prophetic. We see a continuation where the president’s job approval is really — not dispositive, but pretty close to dispositive in these races. And that is a major development.