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Two-and-a-half weeks before the 2016 presidential election, GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump trailed behind Democrat Hillary Clinton by an average of 6% in national polls, a statistic that buoyed Clinton supporters, yet failed to rattle diehard supporters of Trump, who had managed, as The Guardian put it, to confound expectations all year: Hubris aside, some of his supporters remained worried about voter defections in the wake of the Trump groping scandal, prompting calls for an eleventh-hour get-out-the vote drive, not to mention homebrew efforts to rally people to the polls like the image macro below: The Internet meme was accurate insofar as public opinion polls taken in October 1980 showed Democrat Jimmy Carter holding as much as an eight-point lead over Republican Ronald Reagan (a Gallup poll two weeks before the election had Carter at 47% and Reagan at 39%), yet Reagan won a landslide victory in the general election, beating Carter 489 to 49 in electoral votes and by almost 10% in the popular vote. (It should be noted that 6.6% of the popular vote also went to a third-party candidate, John Anderson.) To conclude from that single example that polls simply ought not to be believed is a stretch, however. The 1980 upset was anomalous, the polling organization Gallup says, and based on factors unique to that year's campaign: By contrast, in 2016 the two major party candidates have already faced off in three head-to-head debates, all held well before Election Day, that have resulted in little or no improvement in Trump's underdog position in the polls. And among the many issues and challenges facing America, none of them looms in the forefront the way the Iranian hostage crisis (and the Iranian Revolution in general) did throughout the final year of Jimmy Carter's presidency, as Jonathan Chait noted back in 2012 when Republican challenger Mitt Romney found himself in a similar underdog position against incumbent president Barack Obama in that year's campaign home stretch: John Sides similarly observed when commenting on the 2012 presidential race that the notion President Carter held a polling lead over Ronald Reagan in 1980 right up until the very end of the campaign is something of a misconception: Harry Enten of the statistical analysis web site FiveThirtyEight confirmed that in ordinary circumstances, October public opinion polls are usually reliable and highly predictive of final election results: Given the rarity of last-minute upsets, did Enten think Donald Trump still had a chance to stage a comeback and win the general election despite lagging 6% in the polls? Its possible, he wrote. But it would be basically unprecedented. Is that an excuse for anyone, regardless of party affiliation, not to turn out to vote? No, it is not.
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