https://spectator.org/why-the-polls-predict-trump-will-win/
Lately, pollsters and pundits have been nervously pondering the following question: “If Trump is behind in the polls, why do most voters say, in the same surveys, that he will win the upcoming election?” As Harry Enten recently noted at CNN, “An average of recent polls finds that a majority of voters (about 55%) believe that Trump will defeat Biden in the election. Trump’s edge on this question has remained fairly consistent over time.” This is far more than mere statistical curiosity by number nerds. Several peer-reviewed studies have shown that surveys of voter expectations are far more predictive of election outcomes than polls of voter intentions.
Voter expectations concerning who would win a given election were consistently more predictive than surveys using only conventional polling questions.
The polls that appear to portend a one-term presidency for Trump actually predict that the president will trounce Biden badly this November.
According to studies conducted by researchers in the United States and in Europe, any pollster attempting to divine the outcome of an election should pay far less attention to what survey respondents say about the candidate they plan to vote for than the candidate they actually believe is going to win. Professor Andreas Graefe of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LSU Munich), proclaims these citizen forecasts, as they are sometimes categorized, “the most accurate method that we have to predict election outcomes.” Dr. Graefe elaborates on this assertion at considerable length in Public Opinion Quarterly under the title “Accuracy of Vote Expectation Surveys in Forecasting”: