The Colorado Springs Gazette final

Questioning the 2020 polling disaster

BYRON YORK Byron york is chief political correspondent for the Washington Examiner and a Fox News contributor. He has covered the Bush, Obama, and now Trump administrations, as well as Congress and each presidential campaign since 2000.

As the last presidential election approached, you could probably sense that something was wrong with the polls. The race felt tighter than the polls indicated, and specifically, Joe Biden’s solid lead in the polls felt less solid than surveys suggested. (Just look at this report on the “hidden” Trump vote in Pennsylvania on the eve of the election.) As they had in 2016, it appeared pollsters were on their way to underestimating the vote for Donald Trump.

Now it turns out that feeling was right. And the polls were not only wrong but more wrong than they had been in decades, including their dismal performance in 2016. A new report from the American Association for Public Opinion Research found that national election polls overstated Biden’s lead over Trump by 3.9 percentage points. And state-level polls were even worse, overstating Biden’s lead by 4.3 points.

The polls’ performance in statewide races — contests for senators and governors — was even worse. There, they overstated the Democratic candidates’ lead by an average of six percentage points.

Notice something? The errors went in one direction: Overstating support for Democratic candidates. “Whether the candidates were running for president, senator, or governor, poll margins overall suggested that Democratic candidates would do better and Republican candidates would do worse relative to the final certified vote,” the report says.

So all those Republicans who said the polls were biased against Trump and the GOP — they were right.

Now, the question is why. Many Republicans will answer that it’s simple, that the polls are just biased against Trump and the GOP. Don’t discount the presence of pure bias. But a panel of political scientists and polling experts appointed by the Association found that pollsters had managed to avoid repeating the mistake they made in 2016 — undercounting voters without a college degree who voted for Trump. The problem is, for all their studying, they couldn’t pinpoint was went wrong with 2020 polling.

They don’t think the problem was specifically Trump, or pollsters would have done better on the senators and governors races. They also couldn’t find any specific group of voters that they missed. Instead, they focused on the theory that many Republicans distrust the media and pollsters so much that they would not respond to polling requests. Focusing on those Republicans who were receptive to pollsters gave the polls a skewed view of GOP attitudes.

“That the polls overstated Biden’s support in whiter, more rural, and less densely populated states is suggestive (but not conclusive) that the polling error resulted from too few Trump supporters responding to polls,” the report says. “A larger polling error was found in states with more Trump supporters.”

In the end, though, the panel says it cannot definitively determine where pollsters made their mistake. “Identifying conclusively why polls overstated the Democratic-republican margin relative to the certified vote appears to be impossible with the available data,” the report concludes.

The bottom line: The polls were wrong, and they were consistently wrong in one direction, overstating Democratic support and understating Republican support. And the problem appears to extend beyond the presence of Donald Trump.

No matter who is on the ballot in 2024, pollsters will have a huge credibility problem.

OPINION

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2021-07-20T07:00:00.0000000Z

2021-07-20T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://daily.gazette.com/article/281801401980555

The Gazette, Colorado Springs