They dont like facts and the truth Rail, they only like data that fits their worldview.
Rapture, are you saved?You gonna die soon?
wacth the video and learn somethingWho’s the clown that told us to bet trump -150 before he went to -300?
wacth the video and learn something
kamala is muireders babies. left is all potheads and faggots, athoest jews. scum of earthThere's nothing left for non morons to learn
Joe is going to win bigly
kamala is muireders babies. left is all potheads and faggots, athoest jews. scum of earth
The polls were way off in 2018 too, remember those razor tight races in MO and IN for senate? they weren't so close on election day.Cont'd:
Will 2020 polls reveal a new problem?
We also asked pollsters what, if anything, they were still worried about in 2020, regarding either their own polls or the polling industry writ large. Interestingly — but perhaps unsurprisingly, given all the work they’ve put into avoiding the errors of 2016 — only one pollster, Gravis Marketing’s president, Doug Kaplan, told us he is worried about missing “the so-called hidden Trump vote.”
In fact, Marist’s Miringoff is worried about the opposite: “I’m concerned that the industry may be fighting the last war.” To Miringoff, the obsession with weighting polls by education has obscured other underlying problems, such as a heavier reliance on listed telephone numbers or online methods rather than the traditional method of polling people: random-digit dialing, which Miringoff and many other established pollsters believe results in more of a truly representative sample.
Two other pollsters had a different view, though. “What I worry about as a whole for the polling industry is this continued belief that live phone polls are the gold standard,” Cygnal’s CEO, Brent Buchanan, told us. SurveyUSA’s Leve agreed. “I make no case that the online research studies that SurveyUSA conducts are superior to those conducted by a different methodology,” he said. “But I do argue that they are not inherently inferior.” (FiveThirtyEight’s own research has found that, while live-caller polls face undeniable challenges, they remain more accurate than online polls.)
The most common worries for 2020 polling, though, stemmed from the pandemic. Several pollsters said they worried that pollsters would estimate turnout incorrectly. “This is a perennial difficulty for pollsters and survey researchers, which the pandemic is making even thornier,” CBS News’s Kabir Khanna explained. Quinnipiac University Poll director Doug Schwartz offered an example: “With the coronavirus, there may be voters who tell pollsters that they’re voting but then their area experiences a spike in cases around Election Day, and they no longer feel safe going to the polls.” And Emerson’s Kimball and Morning Consult chief research officer Kyle Dropp both pointed out that voters’ increased access to mail voting makes turnout extra unpredictable. And since polls are only as good as their turnout model, this could lead to some polling misses this fall. (In fact, FiveThirtyEight’s model even built in an extra layer of uncertainty this year because of the possibility that the pandemic will disrupt usual turnout patterns.)
Similarly, multiple pollsters expressed concern that, as Pew’s Kennedy put it, “2020 polls might ultimately look ‘off’ not because they were, but because something went awry with the counting of the votes.” (Pollsters aren’t alone in fearing this; according to a recent YouGov/The Economist survey, only 13 percent of registered voters have a great deal of confidence that the election will be held fairly; 18 percent have quite a bit of confidence, and 34 percent have a moderate amount of confidence.)
Monmouth’s Murray made the point that plenty of factors are outside of pollsters’ control. “Our polls might be accurate in terms of how the election would turn out if everyone who actually votes has their vote counted,” he explained. “But what happens if a large number of mail ballots are rejected, or polling places are closed or lines are so long that voters go home?” Quinnipiac’s Schwartz and PPP’s Jensen had similar concerns, although they were cautiously optimistic that the effect would be minimal. “These kinds of things haven’t had a major impact on polls in the past,” said Schwartz. “But with so many possible factors, and so many states so close, it’s possible that the accuracy of polls may be impacted.”
But plenty of pollsters, including Jensen and Gary Langer of Langer Research, who conducts some polls for ABC News/Washington Post, also said that this year’s polling wasn’t really keeping them up at night. “I feel pretty good about the polling in 2020 largely because the polling was so accurate in 2018, and I believe we are still fundamentally in the same political climate that we were then,” Jensen said. “The low level of undecideds in the presidential race also greatly reduces the chances of a dramatic late shift in the numbers.”
Suffolk’s Paleologos pointed to the fact that national polls were actually quite accurate in 2016 and that the states with the biggest polling errors were not polled by high-quality pollsters in the final week of the campaign; if they had been, perhaps we’d have seen Trump’s win coming. By contrast, “there is more polling in battleground states this year, and that is especially true for some of the Upper Midwest states that proved decisive in 2016,” said Pew’s Kennedy. “There has also been an uptick in the volume of state polling done by major, reputable polling organizations that use more rigorous methods.”
So, perhaps, after four years of hand-wringing, the polls will show they were all right after all.
CORRECTION (Oct. 14, 2020, 2:20 p.m.): A previous version of this article described Langer Research as the primary pollster for ABC News/Washington Post. The Washington Post has its own polling staff, so we have updated the article to better reflect Langer Research’s relationship with the Post.