… After four years of Donald Trump’s severe intellectual and emotional impairments on daily display; after the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and the beginning of a “racial reckoning;” after Trump fought to take health care away from millions; after majorities acknowledged Trump was a serial liar and […] Read more »
All Base All the Time Fails to Deliver
One of the theories given for why pre-election polling underestimated President Trump’s share of the vote was that pollsters failed to anticipate the huge surge in turnout among Trump’s base. One hypothesis is that these voters presented themselves as ambivalent voters — showing less interest in voting than others — […] Read more »
What went wrong with polling in 2020
Political polling is under scrutiny once again. While pre-election surveys set expectations of a Democratic landslide, the presidential contest and many Senate and House races came down to the wire instead. In fact, Republicans gained ground in the House. To understand what went wrong, Judy Woodruff talks to pollsters J. […] Read more »
Why Were The Polls Off? Pollsters Have Some Early Theories
… Yes, Joe Biden ended up winning, as forecasters predicted. But polls overestimated his support in multiple swing states — not to mention the fact that Democrats both lost House seats and didn’t win the Senate outright, despite being favored to do the opposite. It will likely be months until […] Read more »
The dirty little secret pollsters need to own up to
There’s a dirty little secret that we pollsters need to own up to: People don’t talk to us anymore, and it’s making polling less reliable. … For a while, most polls conducted most of the time in most places seemed reasonably accurate, so we kept at it, claiming random sample […] Read more »
What Pollsters Want You to Know About What Went Wrong
… Public opinion research is a thankless job in the best of times. There are no congratulations for charting the nation’s changing preferences toward a wide range of issues, or for basically predicting the future, as pollsters did, for the most part, prior to the 2018 midterms. But there’s no […] Read more »