… “We have created an electorate full of pundits and strategists, and the result is that we’re puzzling through not who we like but who we imagine someone else will like,” said Senator Brian Schatz, Democrat of Hawaii. “It’s a fool’s errand to imagine who will be appealing to someone else.”
The armchair punditry is only exacerbated by a steady drumbeat of polling on the race. After a period of soul searching, pollsters are once again up and running.
A 2017 report by the American Association for Public Opinion Research, an industry group, recommended some changes to polling, notably improving accounting for voters’ education levels, surveying people closer to Election Day and pressing those who say they are undecided on which way they might be leaning. But mostly, the report blamed the “large, problematic errors” in state polls on a single culprit: Money.
“It is a persistent frustration within polling and the larger survey research community that the profession is judged based on how these often under-budgeted state polls perform relative to the election outcome,” the report noted. CONT.
Lisa Lerer & Reid J. Epstein, New York Times