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You are here: Home / Archives for Polling

Member Briefing: The Future of Polling

December 10, 2020 at 10:31 am EST By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

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Filed Under: Members, Polling

What Went Wrong with the Polls?

November 14, 2020 at 7:35 am EST By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

Pew Research: “Looking across the 12 battleground states from the upper Midwest (where many polls missed the mark) to the Sun Belt and Southwest (where many were stronger), polls overestimated the Democratic advantage by an average of about 4 percentage points. When looking at national polls, the Democratic overstatement will end up being similar, about 4 points, depending on the final vote count. That means state polling errors are about the same as in 2016, while the national polling error is slightly larger, at least as of today.”

“The fact that the polling errors were not random, and that they almost uniformly involved underestimates of Republican rather than Democratic performance, points to a systematic cause or set of causes. At this early point in the post-election period, the theories about what went wrong fall roughly into four categories, each of which has different ramifications for the polling industry.”

Filed Under: Polling

Polling Is for Suckers

November 13, 2020 at 8:47 am EST By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

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Filed Under: 2020 Campaign, Members, Polling

The Exit Polls Are Worthless Too

November 10, 2020 at 8:06 pm EST By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

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Filed Under: 2020 Campaign, Members, Polling

State Polls Were Off Almost Exactly As They Were In 2016

November 10, 2020 at 12:39 pm EST By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

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Filed Under: Members, Polling

Why the Polls Were Off This Year

November 10, 2020 at 12:00 pm EST By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

Pollster David Shor explains to Vox why the public polling was off this year:

“So the basic story is that, particularly after Covid-19, Democrats got extremely excited, and had very high rates of engagement. They were donating at higher rates, etc., and this translated to them also taking surveys, because they were locked at home and didn’t have anything else to do. There’s some pretty clear evidence that that’s nearly all of it: it was partisan non-response. Democrats just started taking a bunch of surveys when they were called by pollsters, while Republicans did not.”

Filed Under: Polling

What Went Wrong with the Polls?

November 9, 2020 at 8:18 pm EST By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

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.”

Filed Under: 2020 Campaign, Polling

Nate Silver Defends His Forecast Model

November 9, 2020 at 3:15 pm EST By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

Nate Silver: “The reason Biden’s win probability was ~90% is precisely because he could withstand a fairly large polling error when Clinton couldn’t, which is exactly what happened. Indeed, our model assumes polls are fairly error-prone.”

Filed Under: Polling

Worried Pollsters Admit Huge Problem

November 9, 2020 at 6:35 am EST By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

“Four years later, it’s still easy to hate on the polls. Even if they called the presidential race ‘right’ this time, the national polls vastly underestimated support for President Trump once again, leading to a major industry soul searching about how to fix some fundamental problems,” Axios reports.

“Pollsters privately acknowledge the huge problem, but publicly say they need the final vote tallies to begin the autopsy.”

Filed Under: Polling

The Polling Industry Blows It Again

November 6, 2020 at 6:00 am EST By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

Politico: “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.”

Filed Under: Polling

Bonus Quote of the Day

November 4, 2020 at 1:04 pm EST By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

“The political polling profession is done. It is devastating for my industry.”

— GOP pollster Frank Luntz, quoted by Axios, after serious polling misses in the 2020 election.

Filed Under: Polling

The Real Polling Catastrophe

November 4, 2020 at 11:46 am EST By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

David Graham: “Surveys badly missed the results, predicting an easy win for former Vice President Joe Biden, a Democratic pick-up in the Senate, and gains for the party in the House. Instead, the presidential election is still too close to call, Republicans seem poised to hold the Senate, and the Democratic edge in the House is likely to shrink.”

“This is a disaster for the polling industry and for media outlets and analysts that package and interpret the polls for public consumption, like FiveThirtyEight, The New York Times’ Upshot, and The Economist’s election unit. They now face serious existential questions. But the greatest problem posed by the polling crisis is not in the presidential election, where the snapshots provided by polling are ultimately measured against an actual tally of votes: As the political cliche goes, the only poll that matters is on Election Day.”

“The real catastrophe is that the failure of the polls leaves Americans with no reliable way to understand what we as a people think outside of elections—which in turn threatens our ability to make choices, or to cohere as a nation.”

Filed Under: Polling

Polling Averages You Can’t Trust

November 3, 2020 at 10:07 am EST By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

Nate Cohn points out that RealClearPolitics polling averages this cycle “just haven’t been a fair average of the polling that’s out there. Instead, cut offs are fairly deliberately set to show better results for Trump.”

“This has been true for a while now, but they really took it up a couple of notches over the weekend. And unfortunately it’s enough that I won’t be using the site anymore for citing polling averages.”

Filed Under: Polling

No Matter the Polling Method, Biden Is Ahead

November 1, 2020 at 10:58 pm EST By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

Nate Cohn: “This morning, a big wave of polls showed Joe Biden with a clear lead. Nearly all of these were sponsored by major media organizations and conducted via live phone interviews. If you want to check out what we had to say about them, you can scroll down a bit farther on the page. TLDR: Biden’s still ahead by a lot.”

“This afternoon, we got a big wave of polls showing a very similar result, but by very different means. Nearly all were conducted online or by automated phone calls. Emerson, Ipsos, YouGov (here as part of the Cooperative Election Study) and SurveyMonkey are all fairly familiar pollsters with this approach…”

“I don’t want to get into the ins and outs of which methods might be best. What’s important: Mr. Biden seems to hold a significant lead, no matter the methodology.”

Filed Under: 2020 Campaign, Polling

No Late Shift Toward Trump So Far

October 28, 2020 at 8:36 am EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

A new Wall Street Journal/NBC News study has found no evidence, so far, of the kind of late surge toward President Trump among undecided voters that helped produce his unexpected wins in 2016.

When pollsters asked themselves how so many missed signs that Trump would win the 2016 election, one factor they identified was a late swing toward him in the last days of the campaign.

Filed Under: 2020 Campaign, Polling

‘The Needle’ Won’t Be Used on Election Night

October 24, 2020 at 3:46 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

“The one thing most likely to conjure nightmares of the 2016 election night for opponents of Donald Trump is the Needle,” the AP reports.

“A graphic on The New York Times’ website, the Needle measured in real time the probability of victory for Trump or Hillary Clinton as votes were counted. Its steady movement triggered anxiety for Clinton supporters, who repeatedly refreshed the page, and elation for Trump fans.”

“The Needle won’t be making a reappearance on Nov. 3, one change in the world of election probability gurus following the unexpected 2016 result.”

Also curious: “Nate Silver’s influential FiveThirtyEight blog used a number, not a needle, for the same task four years ago but won’t on election night 2020.”

Filed Under: 2020 Campaign, Polling

If Trump Wins, Polling Is Dead

October 23, 2020 at 9:05 am EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

Pollster Frank Luntz told Fox News that if poll predictions are wrong about the 2020 election between President Trump and Joe Biden, his “profession is done” in terms of faith and confidence from the public.

Said Luntz: “Well, I hate to acknowledge it, because that’s my industry — at least partially. But the public will have no faith. No confidence. Right now — the biggest issue is the trust deficit. And pollsters did not do a good job in 2016. So if Donald Trump surprises people. If Joe Biden had a 5 or 6 point lead, my profession is done.

Filed Under: Polling

Biden Leads By Enough to Avoid Polling Misfire

September 30, 2020 at 5:29 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

Nate Cohn: “For the first time since we started our poll tracker several weeks ago, Joe Biden leads by enough to withstand a repeat of the polling error in 2016.”

“If the polls were exactly as wrong as they were four years ago, Mr. Biden would hold the Clinton states and flip Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona and Nebraska’s Second District, giving him more than the 270 electoral votes needed to win.”

“Of course, the polls won’t be exactly as wrong as they were in 2016. They could understate support for Donald Trump by an even greater degree. But there are good reasons to believe that many causes of 2016’s poll misfire are less likely this time around.”

Filed Under: 2020 Campaign, 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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