A victory for Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election is “not statistically impossible” but is “statistically implausible,” pollster Patrick Basham said on Dec. 6.
Basham, the founding director of the Democracy Institute, told Fox News’ “Life, Liberty & Levin” that based on current projections, Biden defied “non-polling metrics” in the Nov. 3 election against President Donald Trump.
Basham told host Mark Levin that a number of non-polling metrics that measure, for example, party registration trends, how the candidates performed in their respective presidential primaries, the number of individual donations, and how much enthusiasm each candidate generated in the opinion polls, typically have an accuracy rate of 100 percent in terms of predicting the winner of the presidential election.
He claimed that another irregularity in the 2020 election is the fact that Trump secured roughly 11 million more votes than he did in his 2016 presidential bid. Basham also noted that metrics four years ago strongly indicated a Trump win, and that it was the case again for 2020.
“If you look at the results, you see how Donald Trump improved his national performance over 2016 by almost 20 percent,” Basham said. "No incumbent president has ever lost a reelection bid if he’s increased his votes [total]. Obama went down by three and a half million votes between 2008 and 2012, but still won comfortably.”
“If you look at those results, you see that Donald Trump did very well, even better than four years earlier, with the white working class,” he said. “He held his own with women and suburban voters against all of most of the polling expectations, did very well with Catholics, improved his vote among Jewish voters.”
Basham told Levin that Trump had the best minority performance for a Republican since Richard Nixon in 1960, performing particularly well with African Americans and Hispanics.
The president made significant gains with all racial groups, performing particularly well among minority voters.
Exit polls also showed that Trump secured an estimated 26 percent of the nonwhite vote this year—a growth from 21 percent in 2016.
“So if we are to accept that Biden won against the trend of all these non-polling metrics, it not only means that one of these metrics was inaccurate ... for the first time ever, it means that each one of these metrics was wrong for the first time and at the same time as all of the others,” Basham added.
Another potential irregularity in the 2020 election, Basham said, is the low rejection rate of mail-in ballots.
“Rejection rates, which in the primaries earlier this year were well into the double-digits and which historically have often been very, very high in these key swing states, or at least in the key swing counties, we’re seeing rejection rates of less than 1 percent, often very close to zero,” he said.
“Given the increase in absentee balloting and the lack of experience that most of the new voters and those doing the counting would have with those ballots, it is implausible, to put it politely, that that figure would be as low as it was.”
While media outlets can make their own projections as to the winner of the election, state electors and the Electoral College are the bodies that are officially tasked with declaring a presidential winner. Each state has different deadlines for when officials must certify their election results, and the Electoral College votes on Dec. 14.
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