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You are here: Home / Archives for Polling

Why Polls Are Likely Underestimating Republicans

February 19, 2022 at 4:50 pm EST By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

Harry Enten: “Most polls you’re looking at right now are likely underestimating Republicans’ position heading into the midterm election cycle. It’s not that the polls are ‘wrong.’ Rather, it’s that most polls at this point are asking all registered voters who they’re going to vote for in November, when it’s likely only a distinct subset of voters who will cast a ballot.”

“The voters who will actually turn out for the fall election are likely going to be disproportionately Republican based on current polling data and history.”

Filed Under: 2022 Campaign, Polling

Why Is Biden Less Popular?

November 9, 2021 at 10:00 am EST By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

Jonathan Bernstein: “It’s hard to prove anything about such things; there are too many possibilities at play. But it’s certainly suggestive that the pandemic case count bottomed out in the first week of July, so Biden’s slide began right around the time that people started noticing that things were, once again, getting worse. And it continued as economic numbers deteriorated throughout the third quarter.”

“It’s true that the Covid-19 wave peaked in early September, and that case counts have been dropping for about two months now (although they’ve stagnated again). It’s also true, as the data journalist G. Elliott Morris notes, that Biden still gets better marks from voters on his handling of the coronavirus than on most other things. But that doesn’t mean the virus — and its effects on the economy — are not the main cause of Biden’s poor approval. If people have turned pessimistic about the nation and the economy, they are likely to take that out on the president, full stop. Even, paradoxically, if they think it’s not his fault.”

Filed Under: Polling, White House

Pollster Apologizes for Blowing It

November 4, 2021 at 2:40 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

Patrick Murray, whose final Monmouth poll showed Gov. Phil Murphy (D) with a double-digit lead in his re-election race, writes in the Newark Star Ledger:

“I blew it. The final Monmouth University Poll margin did not provide an accurate picture of the state of the governor’s race. So, if you are a Republican who believes the polls cost Ciattarelli an upset victory or a Democrat who feels we lulled your base into complacency, feel free to vent. I hear you.”

“I owe an apology to Jack Ciattarelli’s campaign — and to Phil Murphy’s campaign for that matter — because inaccurate public polling can have an impact on fundraising and voter mobilization efforts. But most of all I owe an apology to the voters of New Jersey for information that was at the very least misleading.”

Filed Under: Polling

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What the ‘Shy Trump Voter’ Effect Means Going Forward

July 21, 2021 at 2:12 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

Kyle Kondik and J. Miles Coleman: “While it’s hard to know specifically what’s going on — remember, we’re talking about pollsters trying to figure out a group that it appears disproportionately doesn’t respond to polls — it seems likely that, in 2020, there was an underpolled group that tended to vote not just for Trump, but for a straight Republican ticket.”

“Needless to say, this is an important group of voters moving forward, but it may be hard to account for them — both for Republicans dependent on their turnout, and Democrats fearful of it.”

Filed Under: Polling

The Upside to Unreliable Polls

July 19, 2021 at 6:00 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

Samuel Goldman: “The diminishing reliability of polls is bad news for campaign journalists and political consultants, but it’s good news for the rest of us.”

“Uncertainty about polls could liberate unconventional candidates to pursue ostensibly unpopular positions and novel strategies. It might also encourage turnout by keeping voters’ hopes for improbable victory alive. Facing the risk of massive error, even candidates who are heavily favored can’t take their core supporters for granted.”

Filed Under: Polling

Pollsters Have No Idea Why 2020 Polls Were Wrong

July 19, 2021 at 6:47 am EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

“National surveys of the 2020 presidential contest were the least accurate in 40 years, while the state polls were the worst in at least two decades,” Politico reports.

“But unlike 2016, when pollsters could pinpoint factors like the education divide as reasons they underestimated Trump and offer specific recommendations to fix the problem, the authors of the new American Association for Public Opinion Research report couldn’t put their finger on the exact problem they face now. Instead, they stuck to rejecting the idea that they made the same mistakes as before, while pointing to possible new reasons for inaccuracy.”

CNN: How pollsters are trying to fix the polls after 2020.

Filed Under: 2020 Campaign, Polling

Quote of the Day

July 12, 2021 at 3:14 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

“If it’s bad, I say it’s fake. If it’s good, I say that’s the most accurate poll ever.”

— Donald Trump, quoted by Forbes.

Filed Under: Polling, Trump Legacy

The Upside to 2020’s Polling Misses

July 1, 2021 at 6:30 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

Natalie Jackson: “It is increasingly clear that how a poll contacts people — formerly a key heuristic for assessing poll quality — no longer tells us what it used to about accuracy.”

“The 2020 primary pre-election polling task force report found that whether the survey was online or by telephone had no bearing on accuracy, and the new task force report presentation indicated the same finding. As a result of their own analysis showing the same thing, FiveThirtyEight has retired the landline and cell phone live-caller survey as the ‘gold standard.’”

“The field letting go of its attachment to one source as more accurate than others will allow other methodologies to become more prominent and encourage further experimentation with new methodologies.”

Filed Under: Polling

Nate Silver Changes His Forecasting Model

June 8, 2021 at 10:36 am EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

Nate Silver: “The changes we made to our pollster ratings earlier this year — namely, no longer privileging live-caller telephone polls — will have some knock-on effects on our models, since our models use our pollster ratings to determine how much weight to assign to polls from different firms.”

“And as I mentioned, while our models already assume that the errors between different races are correlated, those correlations may be even higher in an era of greater partisanship, so we’ll want to look at that, too.”

FiveThirtyEight’s “deluxe” model fared particularly poorly in toss-up congressional races in 2020, only correctly forecasting 37% of them.

Filed Under: Polling

Luntz and McCarthy Mixed Friendship and Business

June 3, 2021 at 6:45 am EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

Washington Post: “When GOP pollster Frank Luntz in mid-March assembled a group of Trump voters to find out why they were hesitant to take a coronavirus vaccine, he invited several Republican politicians to join him in the discussion. One was House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy — at the time also Luntz’s guest in Luntz’s 7,000-square-foot penthouse apartment in the Clara Barton building in Penn Quarter.”

“Luntz did not mention during the Zoom call that McCarthy was in a separate room in the same apartment.”

Filed Under: Polling

Luntz Conflicts Rattle Los Angeles Times

May 29, 2021 at 11:59 am EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

“Well-known Republican pollster Frank Luntz’s work is causing headaches for the Los Angeles Times’ newsroom,” the Daily Beast reports

“Recent revelations that he conducted undisclosed, behind-the-scenes partisan consulting while also doing unpaid work for the paper came as little surprise to staffers, who have previously raised concerns about conflicts-of-interest in his work.”

“The embarrassment also opened up an old wound within the newsroom, where Luntz’s public-opinion surveys had previously been the subject of internal tension and concerns voiced by newspaper staffers.”

Filed Under: Media Buzz, Polling

Frank Luntz’s ‘Impartial’ Focus Group Was Not

May 20, 2021 at 6:37 am EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

Salon: “On Oct. 15, 2018, HBO aired a VICE News focus group orchestrated by Luntz, which had been filmed three days earlier in Dallas.”

“Participants were chosen by Luntz, who also decided what questions would be asked. But what neither HBO nor VICE News told their audience — possibly because they didn’t know — was that Luntz was being paid by the Cruz campaign.”

Filed Under: Polling

2020 Election Was Worst Polling Miss In 40 Years

May 13, 2021 at 1:00 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

Wall Street Journal: “Public opinion surveys ahead of the 2020 presidential election were the most inaccurate in 40 years, according to an expert panel convened by the main trade group for pollsters, which said its work hadn’t yet pointed to a way to correct the error.”

“In the aggregate, the panel said, polls overstated support for Democratic nominee Joe Biden by 3.9 percentage points in the national popular vote in the final two weeks of the campaign.”

“It was the most substantial error in polling since 1980, when surveys found it hard to measure the size of Ronald Reagan’s impending landslide and overstated support for President Jimmy Carter by 6 percentage points.”

Filed Under: Polling

Wary Conservatives, Eager Liberals Undermine Polls

May 7, 2021 at 8:00 am EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

New York Times: “Data for Progress researchers have gotten used to being told to take a hike — and worse — by Trump supporters they try to poll, and the report detailed their difficulties in reaching that group. But perhaps most significantly, it also found that they were having trouble reaching a representative sample of Democrats, as well as Republicans — partly because liberals with strong political views were almost too willing to be polled.”

Filed Under: Polling

It All Comes Down to Turnout Error

April 13, 2021 at 2:50 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

This piece for members is by David T.S. Jonas.

Pollsters have a tough job. If they get things right, there’s no outpouring of praise, but if they get things wrong, observers who aren’t even billing clients throw fits.

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Filed Under: Members, Polling

Democratic Pollsters Admit ‘Major Errors’ In 2020

April 13, 2021 at 7:49 am EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

Politico: “In an unusual move, five of the party’s biggest polling firms have spent the past few months working together to explore what went wrong last year and how it can be fixed. It’s part of an effort to understand why — despite data showing Joe Biden well ahead of former President Donald Trump, and Democrats poised to increase their House majority — the party won the presidency, the Senate and House by extremely narrow margins.”

Said one pollster: “Twenty-twenty was an ‘Oh, s—‘ moment for all of us. And I think that we all kinda quickly came to the point that we need to set our egos aside. We need to get this right.”

Filed Under: 2020 Campaign, Polling

The Tyranny of Polling

March 31, 2021 at 5:00 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

Charlie Harper: “Somewhere along the way, media outlets decided that public opinion polls were the best tools to explain public policy questions in their 90 second news packages and 14 paragraph print stories. Over time, telling the public what others support or oppose has been prioritized as a shortcut over detailed analysis with pros and cons of proposals.”

“These polls are often used to pigeon hole elected officials into support of popular proposals instead of good policy. Too many reporters load up with righteous indignation before asking, ‘77 percent of voters support getting something for themselves and having someone else pay for it. Why are you out of step with your voters?’”

Filed Under: Media Buzz, Polling

Polling on DC Statehood Depends on Framing

March 26, 2021 at 2:00 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

Geoffrey Skelley: “In a February poll taken on behalf of Democracy for All 2021 Action, which backs efforts to admit D.C. as a state, Data for Progress found that 54 percent of likely voters backed statehood while just 35 percent opposed it. However, DFP told respondents that statehood would give congressional voting representation to more than 714,000 Washingtonians, ‘just like Americans in every other state,’ so this question framing likely primed respondents to be more favorable toward statehood.”

“Bottom line: How you ask a poll question matters.”

Filed Under: Polling

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About Political Wire

goddard-bw-snapshotTaegan 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.

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