It’s the question I probably get most, for obvious reasons. Unfortunately, it’s not an easy one to answer, and one reason might surprise you: Poll

Two Theories for Why the Polls Failed in 2020, and What It Means for 2024

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2024-10-22 18:00:22

It’s the question I probably get most, for obvious reasons. Unfortunately, it’s not an easy one to answer, and one reason might surprise you: Pollsters still don’t know exactly why the polls underestimated Donald J. Trump four years ago.

As a post-election report by professional pollsters put it: “Identifying conclusively why polls overstated the Democratic-Republican margin relative to the certified vote appears to be impossible with the available data.”

The exact explanation matters. Under some theories, polls may be much better in 2024; under others, pollsters are still vulnerable to another misfire.

In the absence of a clear answer, most theories center on “nonresponse bias,” in which Mr. Trump’s supporters were less likely to respond to surveys than demographically similar Biden voters. This is reasonable enough, but the details are murky — and again, they matter. In particular, they need to explain why the polls have sometimes been accurate during the Trump era.

It’s easy to forget, but the polls haven’t always been terrible since Mr. Trump came down the escalator. For all the problems with state polling in 2016, the high-quality national polls were excellent, and almost all high-quality polls excelled in the 2022 midterm elections. This variation in results requires pollsters and analysts to build a theory that fits the shifting error. It requires something much more nuanced than “Trump supporters don’t respond.”