Marquette University Law School Poll Director Charles Franklin cautions against calling Donald Trump’s win a “landslide.”
“This is a very consequential outcome, but to call it a ‘wave election,’ or worse, a ‘landslide election,’ I think, really ignores the closeness that is still an important part of the story,” Franklin said at a WisPolitics-Milwaukee Press Club luncheon Wednesday.
Franklin said Wisconsin, which Trump won by about 1%, was the closest state in the entire country.
“Despite all of that, we added yet another 100,000 plus new voters or additional voters this time, so we’re still not sick and tired of elections and staying home,” Franklin said. “So in those ways, we’re a little different from a lot of the country, where turnout either didn’t go up at all or maybe slacked off a little bit.”
Eight Marquette University Law School polls were released this cycle, all of which were within the margin of error. The poll is ranked third by 538’s pollster ratings, with the highest possible transparency score.
Franklin said while the final poll had Kamala Harris ahead by one point, Franklin had made clear either Trump or Harris could win. He also said it’s “unrealistic to believe polling can be more precise” than Marquette’s record of five polls being within a point of the race.
“We all say there’s a margin of error here,” Franklin said. “We’re not certain what the outcome would be, and I think that just reflects our deep desire to see more information and to have more belief of certainty about what the race is going to be.”
Franklin added he feels confident about the questions he asked in his polling.
“I’m sure if I had it to do over again, I could try to come up with something,” Franklin said. “But I actually generally feel we asked the set of questions that I wanted to that I feel comfortable with.”
Franklin said even if the poll understated Trump’s vote by 1.9 percentage points, it’s better than being off by 4 percentage points.
“It shows that we’ve made progress in that direction, and we’ll do a thorough review when the final votes are certified and we have a little breathing space to dig deep into the data to see what we might do to improve,” Franklin said.
