Polling error in 2020, while within the historical range of polling error, has caused a lot of heartburn among Democratic strategists, pollsters, and data analysts. We’re still at work understanding the 2020 election’s polling misses, but one theory that looks accurate is that the COVID-19 pandemic caused polls to overstate Joe Biden’s vote share. For a state like Wisconsin with a heavy COVID outbreak near the election, the added COVID error was as much as 7 points.
Simply put, people more worried about COVID were more likely to take polls, and those people were also more likely to vote for Joe Biden regardless of their age, education, race, gender, or party identification. CONTINUED
Brian Stryker & Oren Savir, ALG Research