Very hard to say. Polling has been basically broken for around six years now.
Looking back, 2016 was a harbinger of things to come. The national polls were still solid (Clinton won the national popular vote, after all), but the state-level polls were pretty bad. They retooled in 2017 and 2018, and did better, but at the same time, land lines were starting to vanish fast, making polling harder and harder.
Since 2018, my sense has been that pollsters don’t really have a solution. The population that will answer unknown calls on their cell phones skews older, but young people have been showing up to vote. There’s only so much you can do with weighting and assumptions to massage a non-representative sample into something useful, and I wonder if we’ve hit the point where the polls are simply going to remain as many as ten points off from reality because of it.
Very hard to say. Polling has been basically broken for around six years now.
Looking back, 2016 was a harbinger of things to come. The national polls were still solid (Clinton won the national popular vote, after all), but the state-level polls were pretty bad. They retooled in 2017 and 2018, and did better, but at the same time, land lines were starting to vanish fast, making polling harder and harder.
Since 2018, my sense has been that pollsters don’t really have a solution. The population that will answer unknown calls on their cell phones skews older, but young people have been showing up to vote. There’s only so much you can do with weighting and assumptions to massage a non-representative sample into something useful, and I wonder if we’ve hit the point where the polls are simply going to remain as many as ten points off from reality because of it.