Wall Street Journal: “During the 2020 campaign, Biden had calls with John Anzalone, his pollster, during which the two had detailed conversations.”
“By the 2024 campaign, Biden’s pollsters didn’t meet with him in person and saw little evidence that the president was personally getting the data that they were sending him.”
New York Times: “While election polling has been around for more than a century, election forecasts have come to the forefront only in the past decade and a half. And while polls are intended to provide a snapshot in time, taking the pulse of how Americans are feeling about a race, forecasts go a step further, analyzing the polling and other data to make a prediction about who is most likely to win, and how likely.”
“But this year, with the polls already showing a razor-thin presidential race, the forecasts often indicated that the race was tied nationally or in swing states, or they gave one candidate or the other only a slight edge.”
“These results raise the question: What is the value of these election forecasts? Proponents say they help synthesize the available information and that more data is better than less. They also argue that the forecasts this year performed well, generally — capturing the uncertainty of a close race, while holding out for the possibility that Donald Trump could sweep the swing states, as he did.”
“But critics say forecasts add more noise than signal — and may even be doing harm.”
“President-elect Donald Trump on Sunday called for the investigation of an Iowa pollster over a bombshell pre-election survey that showed Vice President Kamala Harris leading in the deep red state,” USA Today reports.
Said Trump, of pollster Ann Selzer: “She knew exactly what she was doing.”
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Pollster Ann Selzer announced in the Des Moines Register that she is ending her election polling business and moving “to other ventures and opportunities.”
Mark Halperin interviewed pollster Ann Selzer about her surprise Iowa poll and discussed how her methodology is different than other pollsters.
For members: About That Iowa Poll
“The British are a-coming. This time, they’re wielding a new polling technique with a huge survey sample that some say is more accurate than anything currently in widespread use in U.S. politics — and it’s tentatively predicting a Kamala Harris win,” Politico reports.
“Focaldata, a U.K. polling company, questioned more than 31,000 voters across the United States over the past month for an innovative type of survey called “MRP” that has become influential in Britain in recent years.”
“Combining the MRP results with their large-scale online swing state polling Focaldata assesses Harris is likely to take Michigan, with a lead of nearly 5 points, Nevada with a lead of about 2 points over Trump, and with a slight edge in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.”
“Large numbers of surveys would be expected to show a wider variety of opinion, even in a close election, due to the randomness inherent in polling,” The Guardian reports.
Josh Clinton and John Lapinski: “The fact that so many polls are reporting the exact same margins and results raises a troubling possibility: that some pollsters are making adjustments in such similar ways that those choices are causing the results to bunch together, creating a potential illusion of certainty — or that some pollsters are even looking to others’ results to guide their own (i.e., ‘herding’).”
“If so, the artificial similarity of polls may be creating a false impression that may not play out on Election Day. We could well be in for a very close election. But there’s also a significant chance one candidate or the other could sweep every swing state and win the presidency somewhat comfortably, at least compared to the evenly balanced picture in the polls.”
Nate Silver: “There’s more herding in swing state polls than at a sheep farm in the Scottish Highlands.”
Nate Cohn: “It’s hard to overstate how traumatic the 2016 and 2020 elections were for many pollsters. For some, another underestimate of Mr. Trump could be a major threat to their business and their livelihood. For the rest, their status and reputations are on the line.”
“If they underestimate Mr. Trump a third straight time, how can their polls be trusted again? It is much safer, whether in terms of literal self-interest or purely psychologically, to find a close race than to gamble on a clear Harris victory.”
“At the same time, the 2016 and 2020 polling misfires shattered many pollsters’ confidence in their own methods and data. When their results come in very blue, they don’t believe it. And frankly, I share that same feeling: If our final Pennsylvania poll comes in at Harris +7, why would I believe it? As a result, pollsters are more willing to take steps to produce more Republican-leaning results.”
Nate Silver accused pollsters of putting their “fucking finger on the scale” and “lying” in an episode of his Risky Business podcast.
Said Silver: “I don’t think we’re going to learn very much in this last week of the polling. In fact, I kind of trust pollsters less, they all, every time a pollster says ‘Oh, every state is is just +1, every single state’s a tie,’ No! You’re fucking herding! You’re cheating! You’re cheating!”
He continued: “Your numbers aren’t all going to come out at exactly 1-point leads when you’re sampling 800 people over dozens of surveys. You are lying! You’re putting your fucking finger on the scale! I will not name names, but some pollsters are really bad about this… Emerson College. Whoops! Was that recorded? Oops, sorry.”
The Atlantic: “In 2024, pollsters have been deploying a range of techniques to prevent that from happening again. One common approach: asking people whom they voted for in 2020 to ensure that surveys include enough Trump 2020 supporters.”
“Such techniques, however, can introduce problems of their own. Voters are bad at recalling past votes, and tend to say that they voted for the winner of the previous election even if they didn’t. This raises the possibility, however remote, that polls are overestimating Trump’s support this time around.”
Semafor: “There’s less incentive to get involved thanks to a more sophisticated polling audience and greater costs of failure.”
“We’re now well over a decade into the era of the star election forecaster, led by Nate Silver and his rivals and proteges. His biggest influence may be teaching most news junkies to turn to curated averages of polls rather than fret over each one.”
“This has created a bit of a Heisenberg effect, in which observing something — in this case, that the best analysis comes from mixing together lots of polls with a sophisticated model —might actually change it. What’s the point of shelling out five-figures on a horse race poll if it’s just going to get tossed into an average by an audience trained to scoff at individual surveys?”
Pollster David Byler, writing for MSNBC:
“Polling is built on a simple idea: If we talk to a representative, miniature version of a state or country, we can estimate what the whole state or country thinks. It’s like getting a sample at an ice cream shop: one well-mixed spoonful tells you what a whole cone will taste like.”
“But it’s getting tougher to reach the people needed to build that mini-country or mini-state. Response rates — how often people are willing to pick up a cold call or answer a text from us — have been dropping for decades.”
The related challenge: “We have to model our way around the fact that nobody talks to us. That’s risky.”
New Republic: “In many ways, the polling debate of 2024 comes down to this dilemma. On the one hand, pollsters undercounted Donald Trump’s vote in 2016 and 2020. On the other, in 2022, some of the averages, fed by GOP data, inspired certain observers to discern the infamous red wave that never materialized. So the question now is: Will 2024 be more like 2016 and 2020, presidential elections in which there was a hidden Trump vote, or will it be more like 2022, a midterm campaign but the first post-Dobbs election when at least some observers missed the Democratic vote that turned out in no small part in response to the Supreme Court taking away the right to an abortion?”
“The 2022 cycle also arguably saw a new phenomenon really come to the fore: the rise of openly right-leaning pollsters that consistently showed better results for Republican candidates. Now, these questions have once again arisen: Should these pollsters be included in aggregators’ averages or not?”
Wall Street Journal: “Pollsters have spent the years since 2020 experimenting with ways to induce hard-to-reach voters to participate in surveys and testing statistical techniques intended to improve accuracy. But expert opinion is mixed on whether polling is in for a repeat of 2020, which the professional association of pollsters called the most inaccurate performance in 40 years.”
“New developments, such as the shift of Black and Latino voters toward Trump and the proliferation of online surveys, are creating potential sources of additional error.”
Nate Cohn: Two theories for why the polls failed in 2020, and what it means for 2024.
Nate Cohn: “Over the last month, one methodological decision seems to have produced two parallel universes of political polling.”
“In one universe, Kamala Harris leads only narrowly in the national popular vote against Donald Trump, even as she holds a discernible edge in the Northern battlegrounds. The numbers look surprisingly similar to the 2022 midterm election.”
“In the other, Ms. Harris has a clear lead in the national vote, but the battlegrounds are very tight. It’s essentially a repeat of the 2020 election.”
“This divide is almost entirely explained by whether a pollster uses ‘weighting on recalled vote,’ which means trying to account for how voters say they voted in the last election.”
“Pollsters caution against assuming that the polls this cycle are susceptible to the same errors as previous ones that underestimated support for former President Trump, arguing that every election is different and that this year’s polls are an accurate reflection of the competitiveness of the race,” The Hill reports.
Rasmussen Reports, which claims to be a nonpartisan polling firm, is reportedly giving Donald Trump’s campaign previews of its results before the public sees them, the New Republic reports.
Nate Cohn look at the faults of “so-called online opt-in panels” and why these polls tend to fare poorly despite their popularity.
“Nonetheless, a majority of polls are now conducted in exactly this way: fielded online using people who joined (that is, opted into) a panel to take a survey, whether by clicking on a banner ad or via an app. Traditional polling, in contrast, attempts to take a random sample of the population, whether by calling random phone numbers or mailing random addresses.”
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.
Goddard is the owner of Goddard Media LLC.
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