Pollsters predicted a much higher vote for Joe Biden, including in Florida, where workers at the Pinellas County Supervisor of Elections Office in Largo process voters’ ballots on Nov. 3. Octavio Jones/Getty Images W. Joseph Campbell, American University School of Communication Polling is hardly a flamboyant field that attracts a […] Read more »
Don’t trust the exit polls
… Biden didn’t do as well as public polls projected. Some groups unexpectedly appeared to have shifted toward Trump, such as Latinos. In rushing to understand what happened, some have relied on the National Exit Poll (NEP) conducted by Edison Research to form narratives about what happened and why. But […] Read more »
What Went Wrong With Polling? Some Early Theories
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 […] Read more »
Did ‘Shy Trump Voters’ throw off the polls? Maybe not.
The polls underestimated President Trump’s strength yet again during the 2020 election — and, yet again, “Shy Trump Voters” who feel social pressure to stay silent about their views are being cited as a potential cause of the miss. So the theory goes, these voters believe that even strangers would […] Read more »
The Curious Case of Failed Electoral Polls: Four takeaways for political pollsters from a customer insights researcher
By Rasto Ivanic, GroupSolver By the time all the votes are counted, the ultimate margin of error may not be as huge as it appeared in the morning after the 2020 elections. However, it is already fairly certain that pollsters continue to struggle mightily with predicting election results despite conducting […] Read more »
Trump’s political legacy: Never having the support or approval of a majority of Americans or voters
… He became president in 2016 despite losing the popular vote by a wide margin, flipping three states by a combined total of fewer than 78,000 votes. He was never viewed favorably by most Americans, and most Americans never approved of his performance as president. When it came time to […] Read more »