Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (D-NY), the chairman of the House Democratic campaign arm, said he’s doing a deep dive into the party’s election failures in 2020, including a look at “why the polling sucked,” The Hill reports.

“Maloney said the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has commissioned a report examining why the party lost more than a dozen House seats over the course of an election in which they won the White House and a majority in the Senate.”

Geoffrey Skelley: “So what happened? Were the polls just terribly off in 2020? Not dramatically, no. Yes, polls once again underestimated Donald Trump’s performance, but the magnitude of that error (about 4 percentage points) wasn’t all that different from past presidential contests, such as in 2012 when polls underestimated Barack Obama’s margin of victory by almost 4 points. And there have, of course, been much larger polling errors, too.”

“But one reason the polling in 2020 has received so much attention is that down-ballot polling, namely the generic ballot — which asks respondents whether they plan to vote for a Democrat or Republican in their local race for the U.S. House of Representatives — was also off by a similarly large margin in 2020. In fact… the House popular vote was 4.2 points more Republican-leaning than the polls anticipated, making it the largest generic ballot polling miss in a presidential or midterm cycle since 2006.”

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.”

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.”

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.”

“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.”

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.”

“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.

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.”

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.”