Why I don't believe polls showing Trump behind in midwestern states

New Hampshire? Enjoy all four of its electoral votes. Whatever President Trump's campaign suggests to the contrary, the result of the 2020 presidential election will probably come down to the same handful of states that decided it in 2016: Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.

A new poll conducted by the right-leaning Detroit News and a local NBC affiliate shows both Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders beating Trump in Michigan by 12 percent. Many of his critics are celebrating the result; others are already declaring the race there effectively over and indulging in speculation about other paths to victories for the bad orange man. I'm not sure this is warranted.

The recent polling is exactly in line with where Trump was in Michigan for most of the 2016 campaign. Survey after survey showed Hillary Clinton with a double-digit lead. At one point according to NBC and The Wall Street Journal Clinton's margin was a seemingly insurmountable 16 percent. Only two polls ever showed Trump ahead, one of them conducted on virtually the eve of the election.

How did he ever manage to pull off his exceedingly narrow victory? Was it because 70-year-old union retirees in Macomb County were #ReadyForHillary until the minute they got on Twitter and watched a livestream of James Comey's press conference about the reopening of the Clinton email investigation? Did the Russian troll farms come through in a big way? I think the answer is that the race in Michigan was always a close one and that the polls simply failed to reflect this reality. There is a vast scientific literature on the subject of honesty in anonymous polling; even when they are assured that their answers are anonymous and that the strangers with whom they are discussing what they intend to do with their secret ballots in two weeks or two months or a year from now are disinterested professionals, many people are simply embarrassed by their own opinions. This kind of low-level dishonesty is practically synonymous with what some people call "Midwestern politeness."

More important, however, than what people may not have been willing to discuss openly on the telephone are the subjects they will address without hesitation. The same Detroit News poll that showed Biden and Sanders well ahead of Trump reports that 53 percent of Michiganders do not think he should be impeached.