A Democrat from Michigan, which favored President Donald Trump by seven percentage points in 2016, says polls showing presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden well ahead are “inaccurate.”
Rep. Elissa Slotkin, a first-term congresswoman from Michigan’s 8th District in and around the capital of Lansing, is a former CIA analyst and says there are simply too many variables to accurately forecast an election that won't take place until Nov. 3.
“I don’t believe it,” Slotkin told Politico. “Listen, if anyone tells me they can accurately predict what major events are coming in the remainder of 2020, I’ll give them a thousand dollars.
“I mean, this has been the year of black swans. … I don’t, for one minute, think this race is safe in anyone’s column. I’ve been literally begging people to ignore those polls. They are a snapshot in time. And if 2020 has taught us anything, it’s that we have no idea what’s coming next.”
Slotkin is basing her skepticism on information told to her by a pollster she hired in 2018, when she asked why polls didn’t correctly predict the results of the 2016 presidential election.
“He told me that they fundamentally undercounted the Trump vote; that the Trump voter is not a voter in every single election, that they come out for Trump, so they’re hard to count,” Slotkin said of Al Quinlan of GQR, a large Washington-based polling firm.