Why Do Experts Keep Getting Polls So Wrong?Michael Ginsberg
Congressional Reporter
October 27, 2021 11:40 PM ET
Political operatives have struggled to analyze polls over the last decade, and the problem may be getting worse.
Polling in the 2020 Senate races of key GOP incumbents like Maine’s Susan Collins, Iowa’s Joni Ernst, and South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham consistently showed Democratic challengers running closely against the Republicans, although all three Republicans won by at least six percentage points. One poll, conducted less than two months before election day, showed Collins losing to Democratic challenger Sara Gideon by 12%, although Collins ultimately won by nearly ten points.
Pollsters ultimately underestimated voter support for former President Donald Trump and Republicans in the House of Representatives by four percentage points. While the presidential polling error was in line with 2012 numbers, the error in House of Representatives elections was pollsters’ worst since 2006, according to FiveThirtyEight.
In the run-up to the 2020 election, many pollsters stressed the importance of weighting for educational attainment. Weighting is the process by which pollsters make sure that the groups they poll have a similar demographic composition to the overall electorate.
“People with higher levels of education are more likely to participate in a poll, to answer the phone, to fill out a survey. Most national pollsters knew about this and had a protocol in place. But that practice was not being done by most organizations doing state polling” in 2016, Courtney Kennedy, director of Survey Research for the Pew Research Center, told NBC News in July 2020.
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https://dailycaller.com/2021/10/27/why-do-experts-keep-getting-polls-so-wrong/
