BlueMoonAcrossThePond
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- 27 Oct 2020
- Messages
- 5,221
- Team supported
- Manchester City
Political polling in the USA seems to be much less accurate in the past decade or so than it has been in more distant past.
In 2016, nearly all polls indicated that Hillary Clinton would win election over Trump, easily so. In the wake of the 2016 polling debacle, the American Association for Public Opinion Research, AAPOR, the nation’s leading organization of survey researchers, released a report attempting to identify why pollsters got the election outcome so wrong.
This article reports on an interview with Courtney Kennedy, the Pew Research Center Director of Survey Research shortly following the 2016 election. It's interesting reading.
Among the points that the interview brought up:
* While the national polls generally came pretty close to the actual nationwide popular vote (which Clinton won by 2.1 percentage points over Trump), the performance of polls at the state level – where presidential elections actually are decided – was a lot spottier.
* In 2016 the polls underestimated Trump's performance and Kennedy was pressed to explain this outcome. She replied that: "Another interesting finding had to do with poll respondents’ level of education. A number of studies have shown that in general, people with higher levels of formal education are more likely to take surveys – it’s a very robust finding."
* Another point that Kennedy made: "There’s lots of evidence to show that the resources that news organizations have for polling seem to be declining over time, and that does two things, I think: There are fewer news organizations doing polling, and those that do – particularly local news organizations – are using very low-cost methodology"
Fast forward to 2024 and polls now are even less accurate than they were in 2016. But why?
Some cite the fact that polling is now done over the phone - either using cell phone or landline to contact participants. In a video I can't seem to find (I think it was a Meidas Touch episode), one of the Lincoln Project founders stated that he had no confidence in polls for this reason - namely that those participating in polls would have to be are persons who do not screen their calls and are willing to talk to a complete stranger, answering questions about politics for 30 minutes or more.
Fair enough - but this explanation seems pat - why would this favor one candidate over another (one might well argue that older individuals would be more likely to answer cold calls, granted, and that this would skew results towards Republicans - but why can't this be factored and adjusted for?) and why can't pollsters calibrate their data to account for whatever bias this might introduce. Indeed, we have Kennedy's finding from 2016 which points in the opposite direction - "Another interesting finding had to do with poll respondents’ level of education. A number of studies have shown that in general, people with higher levels of formal education are more likely to take surveys – it’s a very robust finding."
I haven't found any plausible explanation about why polls are consistently inaccurate and moreover why they consistently underestimate - at least in local/or statewide polls - results for the Democratic Party.
If anyone knows about recent, credible articles/studies on this subject, I'd love to read them.
In 2016, nearly all polls indicated that Hillary Clinton would win election over Trump, easily so. In the wake of the 2016 polling debacle, the American Association for Public Opinion Research, AAPOR, the nation’s leading organization of survey researchers, released a report attempting to identify why pollsters got the election outcome so wrong.
This article reports on an interview with Courtney Kennedy, the Pew Research Center Director of Survey Research shortly following the 2016 election. It's interesting reading.
Among the points that the interview brought up:
* While the national polls generally came pretty close to the actual nationwide popular vote (which Clinton won by 2.1 percentage points over Trump), the performance of polls at the state level – where presidential elections actually are decided – was a lot spottier.
* In 2016 the polls underestimated Trump's performance and Kennedy was pressed to explain this outcome. She replied that: "Another interesting finding had to do with poll respondents’ level of education. A number of studies have shown that in general, people with higher levels of formal education are more likely to take surveys – it’s a very robust finding."
* Another point that Kennedy made: "There’s lots of evidence to show that the resources that news organizations have for polling seem to be declining over time, and that does two things, I think: There are fewer news organizations doing polling, and those that do – particularly local news organizations – are using very low-cost methodology"
Fast forward to 2024 and polls now are even less accurate than they were in 2016. But why?
Some cite the fact that polling is now done over the phone - either using cell phone or landline to contact participants. In a video I can't seem to find (I think it was a Meidas Touch episode), one of the Lincoln Project founders stated that he had no confidence in polls for this reason - namely that those participating in polls would have to be are persons who do not screen their calls and are willing to talk to a complete stranger, answering questions about politics for 30 minutes or more.
Fair enough - but this explanation seems pat - why would this favor one candidate over another (one might well argue that older individuals would be more likely to answer cold calls, granted, and that this would skew results towards Republicans - but why can't this be factored and adjusted for?) and why can't pollsters calibrate their data to account for whatever bias this might introduce. Indeed, we have Kennedy's finding from 2016 which points in the opposite direction - "Another interesting finding had to do with poll respondents’ level of education. A number of studies have shown that in general, people with higher levels of formal education are more likely to take surveys – it’s a very robust finding."
I haven't found any plausible explanation about why polls are consistently inaccurate and moreover why they consistently underestimate - at least in local/or statewide polls - results for the Democratic Party.
If anyone knows about recent, credible articles/studies on this subject, I'd love to read them.