Polls Schmolls: Former Obama Adviser on Why the Election Is a “Coin Flip”

Dan Pfeiffer thinks about polls a lot. The former Obama White House adviser and current cohost of Pod Save America calls political polls an “imperfect statistical tool,” a “poison in our political coverage,” and a “content crutch” for narrative-addicted reporters.

But he doesn’t dismiss the data. Far from it. Polls, he argues, are a valuable way to shake people out of their political malaise, which could be especially useful in the 2020 matchup between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, a race that is “at best a coin flip,” he says on this week’s episode of Inside the Hive.

Pfeiffer hosts a podcast for Crooked Media called Pollercoaster, which was inspired by his former Obama campaign colleague David Plouffe’s plea to “get off the Pollercoaster” and stop obsessing over every single new data point. To that end, Pfeiffer’s first rule is to never freak out about “any individual poll.” Looking at polling averages “gives you a better sense of what exactly is happening,” he says, though “it doesn’t mean it’s going to be 100 percent right.”

“You have to understand the polls are not supposed to be predictive,” Pfeiffer adds. “The goal of a pollster is not to tell you what is going to happen eight months from now. It is to give you a snapshot of the political mood at this exact moment in time.”

Thus, Pfeiffer takes polls seriously—but not necessarily literally. He is critical of the Democrats who are in denial about the polling data. During Obama’s reelection campaign in 2012, he said, some Republicans “famously began ‘unskewing’ every poll, saying they were overly Democratic.” Similar “unskewing” is now happening on the left, and Pfeiffer said it “exudes a sort of weakness.” (On Pollercoaster, he regularly asks guests to rate their “nausea level” about the polls; he said his own personal “nausea level” is 7.5 out of 10 at the moment.)

Overall, Pfeiffer’s impression of the 2024 race is that Trump is showing the “slightest of leads right now” over Biden, but “we still have eight months to go.” And, when asked if he would rather be the Biden campaign or the Trump campaign, he still sided with the Democrats.

“I would rather be the Biden campaign,“ he said, “because my candidate is not staring down the barrel of a criminal trial, where many polls show that as many as one in five Republicans would walk away from Trump [if] convicted of a crime. Biden’s age is baked in the cake. A potential conviction for Trump, or even just a trial that extends through the election, is an existential threat to his efforts.“