The truly shocking part of the Michigan primary

| 10:30 am EDT March 11, 2020
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I’m always skeptical of any one poll, but in general I’m a big believer in polling averages. When several professional polling outlets each independently come up with their own methodologies, and they all end up with poll numbers that are within a reasonable range of each other, averaging them together gives us a far more authoritative picture of what’s going. Then there’s Michigan, where we’ve all learned the hard way never to trust the polls.

In the 2016 Democratic primary contest in Michigan, the final polling averages had Hillary Clinton up by twenty points, yet Bernie Sanders ended up winning the state by two points. And then just to rub it in, the 2016 general election polls were off in Michigan as well.

This is all somewhat explainable in hindsight. The 2016 primary polls didn’t take into account the pro-Trump Republicans who were taking advantage of Michigan’s open primary to vote for Sanders as a spoiler. And the 2016 general election polls didn’t take into account the Russian interference that none of us knew was going on in the state. But still, who could ever trust the polls in Michigan again? Sure, the pollsters have surely made adjustments to account for everything that went wrong in Michigan last time, but how do we know those adjustments were the correct ones?

Last night Joe Biden won the Michigan primary by 18 points. The final polling average in the state, as documented by RCP, had Biden winning by 22.5 points. The stated margin of error on these polls was between 4 and 5.5 points, so essentially, the polling averages were correct within their own stated margins. The truly shocking part of the 2020 Michigan primary was that the polls weren’t wildly wrong for once. Dare we trust the Michigan general election polls now? We’ll see.