A new electoral divide has emerged in America.
This divide is not rooted in race, geography, age or education. Instead, it is engagement in democracy itself.
A new electoral divide has emerged in America.
This divide is not rooted in race, geography, age or education. Instead, it is engagement in democracy itself.
Interesting. Which polls were included in your study? Was it the 538 aggregate?
I ask because some polling groups have better methodologies than others. Personally, I tend to disregard those polls done by those interest groups or organizations which have a clear political alignment in favor of others that strive to be neutral. An example I like to give is this Huffington Post poll from 2016 which gave Hillary Clinton a 98% chance of winning; the Huffington Post is not a neutral source. (Note - I am not saying you did this, I am only asking because I am curious.)
I also think it’s important to note that the projections are probability-based, and many of the victories Trump had were potential oucomes predicted by probability-based polling and algorithms. They just were not the most likely outcome. Nonetheless, experience from the last two presidential elections shows the margin of error with Trump is significant and typically in his favor.
These two articles talk a little about polling methodology and how pollsters are working to be more accurate.
Now, I suppose there is always the possibility that we are just in a very unlucky timeline and that there are 498 (or however many) universes out there that have seen Trump thoroughly trounced as predicted. But that’s all hypothetical and therefore moot, and I do agree there is reason to be skeptical of the polling (even as they work to be more accurate.)
Yes, that data set is from the fivethirtyeight aggregate 2020 data set. Polling average of Oct/ Nov, and then I cant recall the electoral outcomes data set, I think maybe UC Santa Barbara stats dept.
I don’t use their weights, just a raw aggregate. It is matched however, so it’s local polling versus local results. I had to drop DC because it was such a an extreme example, but also because the numbers were so low.
On polling in general, I agree with some of the points you are making, by my primary thesis is that candidates like Trump and Bernie engage cohorts that are still typically not sampled in most polls. It should be telling that the US has such low voter engagement, that when you engage a 2-3 % slice of novel voters, you can easily disrupt polling if only 35% of people are voting.
The knife cuts both ways however, where if a candidate like Biden is disenfranchising even a small percentage of non serviced voters, he may poll higher but his performance won’t show it when it comes time to vote.This is exactly what we saw in 2020, where his polling overestimated his performance by an average of 4%.
So I don’t think of polling as broken, but rather, it’s not ever going to be able to show you the whole picture, if the demographics of likely voters have shifted.
I think this is exactly it. For whatever reason, their support is difficult to poll and they activate voters who normally wouldn’t vote and are not captured in polls running up to the election.
In Trump’s case, he is pulling in some very dedicated voters.