2020
ELECTIONS
The polling industry blows it again
“It just seems to be that if the name ‘Donald Trump’
is on the ballot,“ said one pollster, “all bets are off when it comes to the
polls being right.”
By STEVEN
SHEPARD
11/06/2020
04:30 AM EST
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/11/06/polling-industry-blows-it-again-434591
The
pollsters got Donald Trump wrong — again.
When all
the votes are tallied, Joe Biden isn’t going to win the popular vote by double
digits. Trump lost Wisconsin by a point, not the 17-point defeat one survey
suggested. And Trump obviously didn't go down in an election night landslide,
as some polls suggested would happen.
It wasn’t
just the public polls that suggested Tuesday would be a big Democratic night.
Much of the private polling on which both parties rely suggested Biden would
win solidly, and they expected Democrats to benefit down the ballot.
Now that it
hasn’t happened, pollsters are wondering whether their methods are
fundamentally broken — or just unable to measure Trump’s support, specifically.
“This is
not just a few public pollsters out there that missed it. This is something
that is unique to this election,” said Patrick Murray, who runs the Monmouth
University Polling Institute. “It just seems to be that if the name ‘Donald
Trump’ is on the ballot, all bets are off when it comes to the polls being
right.”
It’s
impossible to quantify the magnitude by which the polls missed the mark until
the vote count is complete — but Trump clearly overperformed in many of the
battlegrounds, winning some toss-ups comfortably and running close in states
where Biden had big polling leads.
Trump is
blaming the polls for his seemingly likely defeat. Delivering a defiant
statement in the White House briefing room on Thursday, Trump falsely claimed
that the polls were “election interference, in the truest sense of that word.”
The public
polls, Trump alleged without evidence, “were designed to keep our voters at
home, create the illusion of momentum for Mr. Biden and diminish Republicans’
ability to raise funds.”
Nonpartisan
media and academic pollsters do not rig their surveys to harm Republicans’
political prospects.
But there’s
no doubt that public polls of the presidential race missed the mark, especially
in key states. One popular explanation is that "shy Trump voters" hid
their true intentions in interviews with pollsters.
There's
little evidence that poll respondents are lying, however. More pollsters
believe it’s actually a difficulty reaching voters more likely to support Trump
in the first place, either because they’re harder to find or are less likely to
take phone surveys even if reached.
“The
continuing and growing problem of nonresponse is something that we have to look
at quite closely,” said Don Levy, the director of the Siena College Research Institute,
which partnered with The New York Times for dozens of battleground-state polls.
After 2016,
pollsters engaged in an effort to examine their methods, searching for
something that could explain how they missed Trump's victory. The leading
cause, they concluded, was the widening chasm between how more highly educated
Americans vote versus those who did not graduate from college.
But even
weighting their surveys to increase the number of white voters without a
college degree wasn't enough this year.
While the
polls generally underestimated Trump, the errors were more acute in some
states. In Wisconsin, which has mostly completed its count, Biden won by
seven-tenths of a percentage point, 49.6 percent to 48.9 percent. But that’s
after taking an 8.4-point lead into Election Day in the FiveThirtyEight
average.
Other
states where the polls missed: Ohio, where Trump had an advantage of 0.8 points
in the FiveThirtyEight average, currently shows an 8.2-point lead for Trump in
the vote count. In Florida, preelection polls showed Biden up by an average of
2.5 points, suggesting the Democrat had a slight edge in an election he’s
currently trailing by 3.2 points.
There were
some polls that hit the mark in those states. Trafalgar Group, which says it
tries to account for respondents who lie to pollsters about their support for
Trump, performed well in Wisconsin (Biden +1 in their last poll) and Florida
(Trump +2). But the firm also released other polls that overstated Trump’s
position, like a survey in too-close-to-call Georgia that showed Trump leading
by 5 points, and one in Michigan that gave Trump a slight edge in a state he
lost by 3 points.
Still, the
more common miss for public pollsters was in the other direction. The ABC
News/Washington Post poll in October showing Biden ahead by 17 in Wisconsin got
a lot of ink as an outlier, but the problems were more pervasive than that. The
final New York Times/Siena College polls in Wisconsin and Florida had Biden up
11 points and 6 points, respectively.
In some of
the states, the polls were spot-on. Biden’s 1.2-point lead in the final average
in Georgia looks very close to the still-undecided outcome, and the polls
showed Biden 2.6 points in Arizona, where the count is still ongoing. In Iowa,
the average understated Trump — but the final Des Moines Register/Mediacom poll
correctly saw Trump and GOP Sen. Joni Ernst surging at the end.
But those
were generally the exception.
Down-ballot,
the polling performance appeared even worse than at the presidential level.
Democrats thought their party was favored to win back the Senate and gain
upwards of a dozen House seats. Instead, their path to the Senate majority is
much narrower than before, and they lost seats in the House.
Internal
polls in both parties showed GOP Sen. Susan Collins and Democrat Sara Gideon
locked in a tight race in Maine, where third-party support was seen as denying
either candidate a majority of the vote and giving Gideon an advantage in the
state's ranked-choice system. Instead, Collins is slightly above 50 percent in
the current vote count and isn’t in danger of losing even if she dips just
below that mark.
At the
House level, many of Democrats’ top challengers fizzled despite rosy polling,
and some incumbents thought to be secure went down, such as freshman Rep. Donna
Shalala (D-Fla.).
Four years
ago, when Trump was first elected, the national polls came close to nailing
Hillary Clinton’s 2.1-point popular-vote margin, showing her ahead by about 3
points. It was the swing-state polls that faltered.
This time,
Biden’s popular-vote lead is expected to grow in the coming weeks, as more
votes are tallied. But it won’t come near the 8.4-point lead he had in the
final average, which included some surveys that showed him ahead by double
digits.
“We know that
there’s a lot of Democratic vote that hasn’t been counted in states that
haven’t been called and in states that don’t matter,” said Murray, the Monmouth
pollster.
It will
take weeks to determine the magnitude by which the polls missed Trump again, and
the industry is hoping its critics will wait for more information before
drawing conclusions.
“It will
take weeks for election officials to carefully count all early, absentee,
in-person and provisional ballots,” read a statement from the American Association
for Public Opinion Research on Thursday. “As such, it is premature to make
sweeping judgments on the polls’ overall performance before all the ballots are
counted. Patience is necessary.”
In the
coming weeks and months, pollsters will be poring over targeted surveys and
voter files to figure out whom they missed and where.
"We
will do a systematic analysis to look state by state, demographic by
demographic" at what went wrong, said Siena's Levy. "I mean, that’s
what we have to do. And we have to wait until all the votes are in."
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