The skill of conducting, reading, and reporting political candidate polls has fallen by the wayside – at least in America over the past four election cycles. In 2016, just before Donald Trump’s historic win, Hillary Clinton was leading the future president by 75 points, according to one survey. Now, post a highly anticipated red wave turned to a fizzle, who can anyone trust to take the pulse of the American electorate? It might be time for pollsters to learn how to code.
But as the saying goes, even a broken clock is right twice a day. So, what went wrong this time? Folks who do this thankless job have all sorts of people to blame, including Donald Trump.
MAGA Folks Won’t Talk to Us
It’s a phenomenon that pollsters call a nonresponse bias, and apparently, according to some stat gatherers, only Donald Trump’s most dedicated supporters won’t respond to their questions. But, unfortunately, other Republican identifiers that do speak as likely voters have different answers, which messes up the bottom line. For example, Jon McHenry, a Republican campaign pollster, gave a warning just before midterm election day:
“If there is a big miss this cycle, it’s likely to be driven by voters who are less educated not participating in the polls. The people you do get on the phone, you can always weight them up, but you don’t know exactly who you’re missing.”
For clarification, “to weight them up” means to add emphasis to a survey response. Routinely, every perceived hotly contested race was polled almost daily in the lead-up to the election. Results varied a few points here, favoring one candidate one day and a surge by an opponent the next. Nevertheless, it was enough of a spin to make the political audience invest in a sea sickness patch.
McHenry’s counterpart, Democratic pollster Jon Pollock, also found a way to involve the basket of deplorables for not allowing him the ability to perform his job: “How do I force people to talk to us? It was made worse under the influence of Donald Trump and his conversation of: Don’t trust the media, don’t trust the polls, don’t trust academics, don’t trust anyone.”
Polls Doused by Unpredicted Turnout
Donald Trump (Photo by Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
According to those who survey the expected electorate for a living, turnout will douse the spark of a good sampling. Most polls have begun using voter rolls and algorithms that have worked relatively well since the telephone was invented. All that is now, at best, a questionable practice. Who knew that millions more would register, vote, and turn the 2020 election on its collective ear? A surge in the youth demographic put a checkmark in the win column for Joe Biden. In 2016, the Silent Majority finally grew weary of the likes of the Clinton clan and rose up to put Donald Trump into the Oval Office. And most recently, once a marginalized demographic, the Hispanic voter changed the color of Florida from purple to deep red.
Patrick Murray, an academic pollster, was wary heading into midterms: “There are very few actual persuadable voters out there, and it’s all really an understanding of who’s actually going to show up to vote.” And then there is the teen vote. Of course, no one believes they will get off the couch in the basement, but factor in that, for US midterms, an estimated 8.3 million were eligible to vote. That is obviously the latest missing puzzle piece.
Following in Gallup’s Footsteps
Franklin Delano Roosevelt (Photo by Icon and Image/Getty Images)
Gallup was an iconic household name in polling for decades. Who else could’ve predicted Franklin Roosevelt would defeat Alf Landon in 1936? But after a disastrous 2012 series of presidential polls and nearly ignoring all of 2016, they took their ball and left the field. Maybe they forecasted a bleaker future in trying to determine what Americans were really thinking. And who could blame them? It was right after Hillary Clinton’s unexpected (by some) loss that John Heilemann, one of big box media’s most prominent political analysts, stated: “Polling is broken, like in a profound, deep way.”
Is it time to find a new way of polling the electorate, drop robocalls, and go all digital tech? Nearly every poll released showed a red tsunami heading for the nation. That did not happen. Yeah, blaming the pollsters is probably unproductive, but there’s a good chance statisticians should survey higher education institutions and forecast the best place to enroll in Learn How to Code: 101 – or follow in Gallup’s footsteps.
