‘Old paradigms’ of voter groups ‘busted wide open’, pollster says

We’re joined by pollster and political advisor James Johnson, who correctly predicted the scale of this win for Donald Trump.

Matt Frei: Why did you predict he would win? What were the reasons for it?

James Johnson: So there’s two key things that went into this. The first is that unlike other pollsters, we use a mixed method approach. Now, what that means is rather than just calling voters or just reaching them online, we use a blend of methods to reach who we want to get to. So that could include phone calls, that could include online polling, but it could also include in-app polling. If you’re playing a game on your phone, you get a notification saying, ‘do you want to complete this short survey and win some points’, or indeed text people’s cell phones.

That, we think, helped pick up that key elusive group that pollsters have understated in 2016, 2020 and again this year. That Trump voter who is low engagement, isn’t that interested in politics but does come out and vote. And using that, alongside focus groups and interviews, we also think we picked up the other key group, those non-white voters that switched to Trump.

Matt Frei: So congratulations to you for getting it right and not so much for all the other pollsters. The 99% of other pollsters who got it wrong, because every single one of them, with the exception of Ann Selzer in Iowa at the weekend, said that the swing states were on a knife edge and they just weren’t, were they? So what did they get wrong? And should polling just be kind of shredded and scrapped and start all over again?

James Johnson: As someone who got it right, I’m not going to go quite that far. We think this is just about really thinking about the American electorate. It’s about really getting down and doing the focus groups, doing the interviews face to face. I spent the last three months travelling the swing states, really trying to understand the nuances of the race. One thing that particularly jumped out at me was the interviews that I did with non-white voters. I spoke to Hispanic men in Phoenix, for example, who told me that they were voting Trump for the first time because of their concerns about the border. They said they’d come to the country in the right way, in the fair way, but illegal immigrants hadn’t. That frustrated them and they were going to vote Trump.

That’s not to say that those voters love Trump’s personality. They still found him crude, divisive, nasty, to use some of the quotes they said. But they felt he was the best at sorting those issues, like the border and like the economy. So I do think the pollsters in the US have a problem. I think it needs new blood. I think it needs those new methods that I talked about. But you also have to accompany that with talking to voters face to face.

Matt Frei: When I was in Florida early in the year for a documentary on Donald Trump, I was really struck by the number of Latinos, from just about every country south of the border, who said to me ‘immigration is a massive problem, it’s got to be stopped’. Even though many of them had swum across the Rio Grande or walked across the desert in order to get into this country. Have we completely misunderstood how immigrants, whether they’re legal or illegal, regard migration or immigration?

James Johnson: Yes, I think historically we have. I think, though, the signs have been pretty clear for quite some time. Firstly, Hispanic voters have trended to Trump and the Republicans over the last ten years or so. More slowly than they have at this election, granted, but that’s still been there. And also look at the United Kingdom and that Brexit referendum, eight years ago now, it was the West Midlands and Birmingham that really sealed that vote for leave. And a lot of that was ethnic minority voters, voting leave because of concern about immigration. So if you go out and talk to these voters, it becomes evident, I think, that those old sort of paradigms that Black people must vote Harris, Hispanic people must vote Democrat. They have been busted wide open by this election. But honestly, I think it’s been clear for some time to those out there listening.