The Most Accurate Polls in 2022
FiveThirtyEight is out with updated pollster ratings after the 2022 midterms and finds Suffolk University and Siena College/New York Times Upshot were the most accurate pollsters, while several GOP-affiliated firms were the least accurate.
FiveThirtyEight Bans Pollster Who Bet on Elections
FiveThirtyEight has banned any polls coming from former polling firm executive director Sean McElwee after an investigation brought to light that he’d bet on elections.
How the Midterm Forecasts Performed
Nate Silver: “Let’s get this out of the way up front: There was a wide gap between the perception of how well polls and data-driven forecasts did in 2022 and the reality of how they did … and the reality is that they did pretty well.”
“While some polling firms badly missed the mark, in the aggregate the polls had one of their most accurate cycles in recent history. As a result, FiveThirtyEight’s forecasts had a pretty good year, too. Media proclamations of a ‘red wave’ occurred largely despite polls that showed a close race for the U.S. Senate and a close generic congressional ballot. It was the pundits who made the red wave narrative, not the data.”
What Voters Thought In the 2022 Midterms
The 2022 Collaborative Midterm Survey from Cornell University — a poll of nearly 20,000 U.S. adults with large oversamples in California, Florida, and Wisconsin — was just published.
An interactive feature allows you to really dig into the results. Highly recommended.
How Skewed Polls Fed a False Election Narrative
New York Times: “Traditional nonpartisan pollsters, after years of trial and error and tweaking of their methodologies, produced polls that largely reflected reality. But they also conducted fewer polls than in the past.”
“That paucity allowed their accurate findings to be overwhelmed by an onrush of partisan polls in key states that more readily suited the needs of the sprawling and voracious political content machine — one sustained by ratings and clicks, and famished for fresh data and compelling narratives.”
“The skewed red-wave surveys polluted polling averages, which are relied upon by campaigns, donors, voters and the news media. It fed the home-team boosterism of an expanding array of right-wing media outlets — from Steve Bannon’s ‘War Room’ podcast and ‘The Charlie Kirk Show’ to Fox News and its top-rated prime-time lineup. And it spilled over into coverage by mainstream news organizations, including The Times, that amplified the alarms being sounded about potential Democratic doom.”
Sam Bankman-Fried Takes Out a Pollster
Politico has a deep dive into the fallout at progressive pollster Data for Progress after the departure of Sean McElwee amid allegations of misconduct.
The (Nonpartisan) Polls Were Pretty Accurate
The Bulwark: “The nonpartisan polling was actually pretty good in 2022. Most of the phantom Republican strength in pre-election statewide polling was a function of junk firms with poor data quality and low transparency spamming the polling averages with bad polls.”
“In reality, an aggregation of nonpartisan polls predicted the correct winner in every Senate battleground and would have predicted the margin substantially more accurately than the partisan GOP pollsters which flooded the averages in almost every major race.”
How the Midterm Polls Performed
Wall Street Journal: “Across the eight most competitive races, Democrats on average did about three points better than the final poll averages calculated by Real Clear Politics. And a number of those averages camouflage a wide disparity among individual polls.”
Are the Polls Still Missing ‘Hidden’ Republicans?
Nate Cohn ran an experiment where he paid Wisconsin voters to complete a poll.
“The data is still preliminary, and it will probably take at least six months, if not longer, before we can reach any final conclusions. But there is one immediate difference between the two groups, and that is in the polls’ response rates: Nearly 30 percent of households have responded to the survey so far — a figure dwarfing the 1.6 percent completion rate in the parallel Times/Siena poll.”
“That said, an initial glance at the topline findings may be sobering for anyone who hoped that $25 and higher response rates would break through to reach the coveted ‘hidden’ Trump vote. While there were important differences between the high- and low-incentive surveys — including some that hold promise for improving Times/Siena surveys and others going forward — there was not necessarily obvious evidence of a breakthrough to a vastly different pool of respondents.”
Will the Polls Be Wrong Again?
Nate Silver: “My personal view of the race is pretty well aligned with the FiveThirtyEight Deluxe model. The polls could very well be biased against Republicans again. The best reason to think so is probably the ‘Nathan Redd’ argument that as polling gets more difficult, you should put more faith in the fundamentals. Usually, the president’s party has a rough midterm, especially when the president has a 42 percent approval rating and inflation is at 8.2 percent.”
“But it’s not hard to imagine how the polls could be biased against Democrats instead. After 2016 and 2020, pollsters face more reputational risk from again missing high on Democrats than the other way around, and that could consciously or unconsciously affect decisions they make at the margin, or even which polls they release to the public. Moreover, the composition of polling averages has considerably changed, with fewer ‘gold standard’ polls and more quick-and-dirty ones that tend to show more favorable results for Republicans.”
Are Republicans Rigging the Poll Averages?
Politico: “Some Democrats have fretted that Republican firms are deliberately flooding the zone for the purpose of affecting these polling averages — and the subsequent news coverage that comes with apparent momentum.”
Dan Pfeifer: “While I put nothing past the Republicans, there is no evidence to suggest the existence of coordinated efforts to rig the polling averages to create the false impression of a Red Wave. To be honest, this collection of clowns tends to commit their crimes in public.”
“But… creating a false sense of momentum is a long-running Republican strategy. Many Republicans believe the best way to win elections is to convince voters that you are already winning. The strategy is loosely based on the idea of social proof – people want to be with the winners, not the losers.”
Polling Averages Unlikely to Be Missing Republicans
Nate Cohn: “Way back in September, we noticed a warning sign in the polls: Democrats were showing strength in exactly the places where the polls overestimated their chances in 2020.”
“The pattern raised the possibility that solid Democratic leads in several key Senate races were a mirage — the result of the same biases that led the polls to overestimate Democrats in those same states two years earlier.”
“With the election only days away, that warning sign is gone: There is no longer any material relationship between relative Democratic or Republican strength in the key Senate races and the polling error from 2020.”
The Polling Averages Are Different This Year
Nate Cohn: “Many stalwarts of political polling over the last decade — Monmouth University, Quinnipiac University, ABC/Washington Post, CNN/SSRS, Fox News, New York Times/Siena College, Marist College — have conducted far fewer surveys, especially in the battleground states, than they have in recent years. In some cases, these pollsters have conducted no recent polls at all.”
“And on the flip side, there has been a wave of polls by firms like the Trafalgar Group, Rasmussen Reports, Insider Advantage and others that have tended to produce much more Republican-friendly results than the traditional pollsters. None adhere to industry standards for transparency or data collection. In some states, nearly all of the recent polls were conducted by Republican-leaning firms.”
“This creates a big challenge for a simple polling average like this one. From state to state, Democrats or Republicans might seem to be doing much better or much worse, simply depending on which kind of pollster has conducted a survey most recently. The race may seem to swing back and forth, from week to week.”
Polls May Still Be Underestimating Republican Support
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Three Reasons Why Midterm Polls Could Be Wrong
Jonathan Bernstein: “First, normal polling error could be more of a problem in this election because there are simply fewer polls in 2022 than there used to be. The less polling you have, the more unreliable the estimate will be…”
“Second, it is harder to do polling these days. Between the demise of landline phones and the ever-shrinking share of voters willing to talk to pollsters, the old way of doing things that persisted for some 50 years is pretty much gone…”
“A final challenge is the change in who votes and how. In the last several elections, we’ve had constant change in voting rules. Some states have made voting easier with automatic voter registration, relaxed rules for absentee voting and extended early voting. Other states have made it more difficult by reversing those policies. Republican voters, who until 2020 were more likely to use absentee ballots, are now much less likely to vote that way. All of this changes how likely different groups are to vote, but not necessarily in predictable ways.”
Earlier for members: We Won’t Know If Polls Are Broken Until After the Election
We Won’t Know If Polls Are Broken Until After the Election
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Where the Polls Tends to Misfire
The Economist: “Whether Democrats are favored to win a majority of seats in the Senate depends on whether you trust the polls. The Economist’s aggregate of publicly available pre-election surveys puts the party ahead in 14 of the 35 Senate seats up for re-election this year. That would give the Democrats 50 senators, including the 36 seats that are not being contested this time. Among the ten most-competitive states, our poll-of-polls suggests Republicans are favored to gain a Senate seat in Nevada, but lose one in Pennsylvania.”
“But recent history suggests Democrats will underperform those numbers. In 2016-20 our aggregate of polls overestimated the share of the vote that Democratic candidates for senator and president ultimately won by an average of 2.2 percentage points across every state polled (see chart). Although pollsters updated their methods to try to iron out such errors, in 2020 the bias grew to 2.5 points. Even in 2018, when the pollsters did well on the whole, they undercounted Republican support in key states such as Ohio and Michigan.”
“The numbers now look rosiest for Democrats in the states where polls have recently been least reliable.”
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