… In 2020, polls appear to have overconfidently predicted that Joe Biden would handily defeat incumbent President Trump. While researchers are sorting out the final numbers, some observers are arguing that polling has outlived its usefulness. …
But while election polling definitely has problems that need to be studied, some pundits are claiming that public opinion polling has failed entirely. That’s not so. Mass opinion polling is a very different animal from election forecasting polls. It occurs regularly between elections, examining all manner of political and social attitudes and behaviors. And it’s reliable and useful for political scientists and others who study U.S. democracy.
So what’s the difference? In pre-election polls, pollsters must estimate who will vote. In mass public opinion polls, pollsters don’t have that problem. Survey samples can be effectively weighted to match census data about the entire adult U.S. population and its subgroups, drawing on an enormous research literature on trends and patterns in public opinion, including partisan conflict today. CONTINUED
Robert Y. Shapiro (Columbia), Monkey Cage