Marist Poll Shares Takeaways as 2020 Presidential Election Approaches

With less than 25 days until the 2020 presidential election, the Marist Alumni Office held a virtual event with the directors of the Marist Poll to break down their results and address the latest innovations taking place at the poll. 

Source: Greta Stuckey, ‘23

The virtual session was open to students, faculty, alumni and community members. Speaking on behalf of the poll was founder and Director Dr. Lee M. Miringoff and Director Dr. Barbara L. Carvalho ’79. 

Carvalho started the conversation by addressing their most recent polling projects. 

“We have been doing national polling with PBS NewsHour and National Public Radio (NPR),” Carvalho said. “Then we have been doing competitive state polls with our partner NBC News, so they have all kept us very busy.” 

In addition, Carvalho highlighted the challenges student pollers and employees have faced since the pandemic closed campus last March. The poll room is no longer in use to abide by social distancing rules, and pollers are using new technologies to stay virtually connected. Around 200 students worked for the poll throughout the summer which provided an opportunity for a remote job when many in person jobs and internships were canceled. 

“Our beloved polling room in the Hancock Center has been somewhat retooled since March for social distancing,” Carvalho said. “We seamlessly transitioned to an entirely remote call center and are still using all the technology that we had in the phone center, but we have also added a couple other things like Microsoft Teams, Zoom rooms and, of course, we are using Marist’s learning management system, iLearn.” 

The conversation then shifted as Miringoff informed the audience of his projections for the 2020 presidential election based on the most recent Marist Poll data. Before getting into the statistics, he shared Marist’s standing according to FiveThirtyEight, an organization that studies opinion poll analysis.

“There are 420 polling organizations in the county, six of whom get an A+ rating from FiveThirtyEight, and we are proudly one of those six,” Miringoff said. 

According to Miringoff, the most recent polls from Marist and other institutions show that citizens have lost confidence in America’s leaders and institutions. He also believes that the polling results show that the American public has become more polarized because of the shifting demographics of citizens and the changing geography of red and blue states. 

“What we are seeing is that the blue [Democratic] states tend to be states with larger populations and the red [Republican] states tend to be the states with smaller populations, which creates an imbalance in the electoral college and the senate,” Miringoff said. “If Biden carries every state that Hillary Clinton carried in 2016 and flips Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, he then has enough electoral votes to win.”   

The conversation finished by allowing guests to ask Miringoff and Carvalho questions about the poll and more information on their outlook for the 2020 election. With many alumni in attendance, Miringoff made a closing remark about the success of the college in dealing with COVID-19 this semester. 

“You can’t walk around campus without seeing a student wearing masks,” Miringoff said. “I just wanted you to know that the legacy that you guys left is really commended by the current student body.”