Trade is An Issue That Links Sanders and Trump
Pollsters had a heap of explaining to do after Sen. Bernie Sanders defeated former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Michigan's Democratic primary, beating odds that pollsters had put at 99-to-one.
Polls had Clinton leading Sanders by anywhere from 5 percent to 37 percent in the final week. He won by 50 percent to 48 percent.
Poll aggregator Nate Silver's site FiveThirtyEight.com said, "By most measures, it's the biggest polling miss in a primary in modern political history."
What went wrong? The possibilities tell us a lot about the unique nature of this presidential campaign cycle.
They include an underestimation of youth turnout, a failure to call enough cellphones as well as landlines, an underestimation of how many independents would vote and a failure to poll after Sunday, missing the impact of the Clinton-Sanders debate in Flint.
Crossover voters also threw forecasts off. Some 7 percent of Republican primary voters identified themselves as Democrats to exit pollsters, compared to only 4 percent in the Democratic primary who said they were Republicans.
Call it strategic voting. After the polls indicated Clinton was a shoo-in, some Democrats in Ann Arbor on Election Day told me they were voting for Sanders to send a message to Clinton, or for Republican Gov. John Kasich from neighboring Ohio to send a message to the Grand Old Party's frontrunner Donald Trump.
Bernie Porn, president of Lansing-based EPIC-MRA, which polled for the Detroit Free Press, supported that theory but said the exit-poll samples were too small to check it out.
Significantly, pollsters underestimated Sanders's support among black voters. After YouGov and Mitchell Research and Communications found Sanders had less than 20 percent of black voters, the same percentage he had won in most states that have large black populations, Sanders actually won 28 percent.
That tends to support my theory about Sanders' black support. The former civil rights activist and avowed "democratic socialist" is nowhere near as well known in black communities as Hillary Clinton. But the more African-Americans get to know him, the more they are appear to like him.
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