“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.
“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.”
You are reading the free version of Political Wire.
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.”
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.
“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.”
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.
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.”
A new Morning Consult survey finds little basis for the theory that there are “shy” Trump voters who don’t tell pollsters the truth about who they will support.
The Upshot has an interesting twist on polling averages, showing the key battleground states along with what would happen with a polling error similar to those in 2016 or 2012.
But Jonathan Bernstein has two caveats: “One is that the chart assumes any error would be in the same direction, which it may not be; I’d rather they demonstrated the size of the error, which could favor either candidate. The other thing is that the ‘polling error’ here includes the final three weeks of polls in each of those previous elections, but there’s good reason to believe that the race shifted in Donald Trump’s direction in the final days in 2016, so part of what’s being called an error here is really polls taken before voters changed their minds.”
Philip Bump: “A number of recent polls at the state level have measured both the presidential election and Senate races. If people were wary of revealing support for Trump specifically, it’s safe to assume that Trump would trail the Republican Senate candidates.”
“For the most part, though, the opposite is true.”
Sean Trende: “In 2016, as I was preparing to write my ‘Why Hillary Will Win’ piece, I decided to have my able then-assistant, David Byler (now of Washington Post fame), do a bit of research. His job was to look up the share of the electorate that pollsters were anticipating for whites without college degrees and for African Americans.”
“What he found put an end to the piece. It seemed a big bet was being placed on 2012 levels of black turnout occurring in 2016 and, more importantly, that pollsters were badly underestimating turnout for whites without college degrees. In previous years, that hadn’t really mattered – whites with and without college degrees voted Republican at roughly the same levels. Underestimating the share of whites without college degrees and overestimating whites with college degrees wouldn’t have mattered in 2012 or 2008, because their votes were fungible.”
Related for members: The Uncertainty In This Election
Harry Enten: “Let’s state it up front: winning the popular vote means nothing in and of itself. You only become president if you win the Electoral College.”
“That said, the national polling matters a lot. We have a ton of it, unlike in a number of swing states. It’s more accurate than the state polling on average. Most importantly, we have a fairly good idea of what Biden’s margin needs to be nationally in order to win in the Electoral College.”
Key takeaway: “If Biden wins by more than 5 points nationally, he’s almost certainly going to win enough electoral votes to get to at least 270 and take the Electoral College. There’s simply little record of a difference between the margin in the key swing states and the national vote being greater than 5 points.”
“If Biden wins by somewhere between 3 and 5 points nationally, he’ll be the clear favorite in the Electoral College, even if there is some non-negligible chance Trump could emerge victorious.”
President Trump on Twitter:
“Fox News Polls are, as in the past, Fake News. They have been from the beginning, way off in 2016. Get a new pollster. I believe we are leading BIG!”
President Trump claimed it’s not possible to do fair polls of registered voters — only likely voters — because many registered voters have died, CNN reports.
He did not explain how dead voters answer polls.
Nate Silver says national polling trends are more important than the lead itself.
“In other words, I don’t really care if Biden us up 8 nationally or whatever. I care about the numbers in Wisconsin, Florida, etc. But if Biden has gained 2 points in national polls, it’s likely that he’s also gained roughly 2 points in Wisconsin and Florida since they were last polled.”
“In theory, you can also impute these trends from state polls (i.e. if Biden is gaining in Michigan, he’s probably gaining in Wisconsin) and our model does do that too. But national polls give you a high volume of polls from a relatively constant set of pollsters—making trend detection easier.”
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.
“There are a lot of blogs and news sites claiming to understand politics, but only a few actually do. Political Wire is one of them.”
— Chuck Todd, host of “Meet the Press”
“Concise. Relevant. To the point. Political Wire is the first site I check when I’m looking for the latest political nugget. That pretty much says it all.”
— Stuart Rothenberg, editor of the Rothenberg Political Report
“Political Wire is one of only four or five sites that I check every day and sometimes several times a day, for the latest political news and developments.”
— Charlie Cook, editor of the Cook Political Report
“The big news, delicious tidbits, pearls of wisdom — nicely packaged, constantly updated… What political junkie could ask for more?”
— Larry Sabato, Center for Politics, University of Virginia
“Political Wire is a great, great site.”
— Joe Scarborough, host of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe”
“Taegan Goddard has a knack for digging out political gems that too often get passed over by the mainstream press, and for delivering the latest electoral developments in a sharp, no frills style that makes his Political Wire an addictive blog habit you don’t want to kick.”
— Arianna Huffington, founder of The Huffington Post
“Political Wire is one of the absolute must-read sites in the blogosphere.”
— Glenn Reynolds, founder of Instapundit
“I rely on Taegan Goddard’s Political Wire for straight, fair political news, he gets right to the point. It’s an eagerly anticipated part of my news reading.”
— Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist.