(Fox News) Republican pollster Frank Luntz told Fox News’ Bret Baier on Thursday night, that his "profession is done" if President Trump wins re-election come Nov. 3, and proves the national polls wrong yet again.
“I hate to acknowledge it, because that's my industry — at least partially — but the public will have no faith. No confidence. Right now, the biggest issue is the trust deficit,” Luntz said in response to Baier asking how pollsters will fare if they are wrong in predicting the 2020 presidential election. “Pollsters did not do a good job in 2016. So, if Donald Trump surprises people, if Joe Biden had a 5- or 6-point lead, my profession is done."
National polls largely show Biden with a lead over Trump with two weeks until the presidential election.
Real Clear Politics, which pools together several national polls and takes the average, shows Biden up by 7.9 points, though in battleground states the former vice president is only up by 3.8 points – well within margin of error, which generally hovers around plus or minus four points.
A Quinnipiac University poll from Thursday shows Biden with a 51% to 41% lead. Poll aggregator fivethirtyeight.com also has Biden with a 10-point national lead, projecting that Biden has an 87% chance of winning.
Hillary Clinton, too, was projected to win in 2016. Fivethirtyeight.com had her at a similar winning chance in mid-October, above 87%, though that fell as low as about 65% a few days before the election.
Projections for the Clinton-Trump race generally were more volatile than the Biden-Trump race. Fivethirtyeight.com had the Clinton-Trump race essentially tied in terms of winning likelihood in late July 2016 and Clinton with a 54.8% chance of winning in late September. The aggregator has said that Biden's winning likelihood since June has never been below 67%.
Luntz, a GOP pollster, thinks that Biden will win the presidency after claiming that Trump won the second and final presidential debate Thursday.
“You've got to give Trump a minor victory because he’ll bring some (undecided) voters home, and it’ll close the race a little bit," Luntz told CNBC’s “Squawk Box" Friday. "But in the end, I think Joe Biden won the war.”
Clinton also faced obstacles that Biden is not necessarily struggling with.
Clinton was running in the post-Obama administration era and reports after the 2016 upset showed that voters were intrigued by Trump’s unusual, non-political behavior and ready for a shift in Washington.
Other major factors that will come into play during the 2020 election are the COVID-19 pandemic, which has killed nearly 224,000 Americans, most of them older, and the number of voters who were disillusioned with the 2016 presidential race and opted not to vote at all.
Although more people are expected to vote early during the 2020 presidential election, opposed to waiting until Election Day to vote in-person, more than 38% of the number of votes cast in 2016 have already been recorded with two weeks remaining until the General Election, according to the U.S. Election Project.
Democrats so far have cast their vote at a rate nearly double that of Republicans, though as early polling stations are opening that ratio likely will begin to narrow.
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