What Went Wrong with the Polls?

The New Yorker interviews Nate Cohn on the polling mishaps in the 2020 election.

His biggest surprise: “The Hispanic vote. The swing towards Trump in Hispanic areas across the country is extraordinary. It was hinted at in the pre-election polls. The polls always showed the President faring better among nonwhite, and particularly Hispanic, voters than he did four years ago, but the magnitude of the shift was way beyond expectations. We learned that early in the night in Miami-Dade County, where no one had the President doing as well as he did. And it has proven true, as far as I can tell, basically everywhere in the country among Latino voters, to varying degrees. It’s true down-ballot. It’s not like this was just about the President. And I think it’s a huge and important political story.”

“And the second thing that really surprised me is the white, rural, Midwestern vote. The pre-election polls said that Joe Biden was doing much better than Hillary Clinton was four years ago among white voters without a degree. And those gains simply did not materialize. The results looked quite a bit like 2016 across most of rural America, and there were many areas where Donald Trump did better in white working-class areas than he did in 2016.”