Derivative Polling tracks changes in polls from the same pollster.
“Rather than combining every poll under the sun, with complex corrections for pollster reliability, bias, state effects, economic fundamentals or whatnot, this tracker instead focusses on changes from one poll to the next by the same pollster.“
It’s updated daily.
“Candidates and voters alike are wondering whether they can trust the polls ahead of November’s elections,” Axios reports.
“The 2016 and 2020 elections rocked public confidence in polling after many underestimated the amount of support for former President Trump. Meanwhile, pollsters are having to adapt their methods, with fewer respondents answering the phone.”
Nate Silver has released new pollster ratings which differ from the methodology used by his old home, FiveThirtyEight.
“The top-rated pollsters — Selzer & Co. and The New York Times/Siena College — will be familiar to longtime readers.”
“For the record, though, eligible polls in the 2024 presidential primaries missed the final margin between the top two candidates by an average of 9.7 percentage points. That isn’t very accurate, obviously — but it’s consistent with the long-term average error in presidential primary polls since 2000, which is 9.3 percentage points.”
Politico: “It’s true that surveys overestimated Trump’s actual vote share in eight of the 10 states where there was enough polling for FiveThirtyEight to produce an average. And after a spate of national polls showed Biden behind Trump, the president’s campaign asserted that polling “consistently overestimates Donald Trump while underestimating President Biden.” Aides cited the results of the presidential primaries and special elections held since 2022 as proof.”
“But both are misleading indicators. That’s because the reason polling overestimated Republican margins in the primaries and special elections is unlikely to be duplicated in the general election: It was hard for pollsters to know which voters were going to show up.”
“Using polling to estimate election results requires making informed choices about the composition of the electorate. But the Republican primary electorate is much smaller and harder to predict than the much broader segment of voters likely to turn out in November for the general election.”
G. Elliot Morris: “So far, the Biden campaign’s strategy has been to publicly dismiss the polls rather than confront their bad numbers head-on. For instance, at the opening ceremony of a campaign field office in Manchester, New Hampshire, Biden disparaged polls as inaccurate and stuck using old-fashioned technology.”
“Biden is wrong about that. Despite the challenges facing the industry, polls remain as accurate as ever. But that doesn’t mean that polls taken eight months before Election Day are reliable predictors of the final outcome. My analysis of polling from past elections reveals that there is plenty of precedent for a candidate like Biden to gain enough ground to win the election. Moreover, I find there is more uncertainty in the polls now than in previous cycles, further casting doubt on the early gloomy prognostication about Biden’s odds.”
“The poll aggregation and evaluation site 538, part of ABC News, dropped the right-wing polling firm Rasmussen Reports from inclusion in its polling averages and forecasts,” the Washington Post reports.
Nate Cohn: “It’s still early in the primary season, but a whiff of a possible polling error is already in the air. That’s because Donald Trump has underperformed the polls in each of the first three contests.”
“So what’s going on? We can’t say anything definitive based on the data at our disposal, but three theories are worth considering.”
“One of them… seems especially plausible and consistent with something we’ve written about before: Anti-Trump voters are highly motivated to turn out this cycle. It wouldn’t mean the polls will be wrong in November, but it would be good news for Democrats nonetheless.”
Dan Pfeiffer: “These days, partisans gravitate to the polls that support their chosen narrative. Trump ‘truths’ the polls that show him winning. Haley supporters and Biden adherents tout the ones that show Biden winning. I love seeing polls that show Biden up. However, it’s best not to get too worked up over an individual poll, and instead look at the overall average and broader trends. That advice, of course, is hard to adhere to in an election with so much at stake.”
“The broader trends of the recent polling tell me two things. First, Biden, at minimum, has stabilized, and things may be looking up as people’s views on the economy improve. Second, the polls are consistent with what we have long assumed — this is a very close and winnable race that will come down to less than 100,000 votes across a small handful of states. Our task is the same if the polls show Biden up by 2 or down by 5.”
FiveThirtyEight has updated its pollster scorecard.
“The New York Times/Siena College, for example, is the most accurate pollster in America. Due to its accuracy and transparency, it and ABC News/Washington Post are also the only two pollsters with a three-star rating.”
“Every losing campaign complains about the polling. When it’s one poll or one outlet’s series of polls, maybe you can make the case they are garbage. In fact, most public polls are trash. But when every poll shows the same trends, the griping comes across as desperate and pure spin to give their supporters hope not to throw in the towel before voting even starts.”
— GOP strategist Dave Carney, quoted by the Washington Examiner.
Nathan Gonzales: “Despite seven years of hand-wringing about polling, it was a pretty good night for surveys. The final FiveThirtyEight average before the Iowa caucus had Trump at 52.7 percent followed by former Gov. Nikki Haley (18.7 percent), Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (15.8 percent), and Vivek Ramaswamy (6.4 percent).”
“The final results look like Trump (51 percent), DeSantis (21 percent), Haley (19 percent), and Ramaswamy (8 percent).”
“People seeking perfection from polling will quibble with the DeSantis polling versus his final result, but overall, Iowa should be considered a victory for the polling industry, especially in the context of a low-turnout caucus in extreme weather.”
The Economist: “As America enters a nervous election year, one thing is certain: the opinion polls will be watched closely for clues about the outcome. But how much faith should be placed in them? In the past two presidential cycles they misfired, badly underestimating support for Donald Trump each time. Mr Trump looks likely to be the Republican nominee again. In head-to-head polls he leads Joe Biden by 2.3 points on average. That suggests a toss-up. Polls conducted so far in advance of the election have generally missed by a margin far greater than Mr Trump’s current lead.”
“And Mr Trump’s voters vex pollsters: they appear to be disproportionately less likely to take part in pre-election surveys yet turn out to vote for him. Pollsters have been grappling with ways to reflect this in their numbers, but no one knows how well their adjustments will work. In a close contest, even small errors can prove critical.”
Nate Cohn: “If you do this exercise for previous elections, issue polling failures look more like the norm than the exception. There just aren’t many elections when you can read a pre-election poll story, line it up with the post-election story, and say that the pre-election poll captured the most important dynamics of the election…”
“With such a poor track record, there’s a case that ‘issue’ polling faces a far graver crisis than ‘horse race’ polling. I can imagine many public pollsters recoiling at that assertion, but they can’t prove it wrong, either. The crisis facing issue polling is almost entirely non-falsifiable — just like the issue polling itself. Indeed, the fact that the problems with issue polling are so hard to quantify is probably why problems have been allowed to fester. Most pollsters probably assume they’re good at issue polling; after all, unlike with horse race polls, they’re almost never demonstrably wrong.”
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.