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.
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.