Asking for a polling post-mortem at this stage is a little bit like asking a coroner for the cause of death while the body is still at the crime scene. You’re going to have to wait to conduct a full autopsy.
But make no mistake: It’s not too early to say that the polls’ systematic understatement of President Trump’s support was very similar to the polling misfire of four years ago, and might have exceeded it. …
In the broadest sense, there are two ways to interpret the repeat of 2016’s polling error. One is that pollsters were entirely wrong about what happened in 2016. As a result, the steps they took to address it left them no better off. Another is that survey research has gotten even more challenging since 2016, and whatever steps pollsters took to improve after 2016 were canceled out by a new set of problems.
Of these two, the latter interpretation — real improvements canceled out by new challenges — may make the most sense. CONT.
Nate Cohn, New York Times
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