Why polls dont matter

Media outlets and pollsters took the heat for failing to project a victory for Donald Trump. The polls were ultimately right about the popular vote. But they missed the mark in key swing states that tilted the Electoral College toward Trump.

This time, prognosticators made assurances that such mistakes were so Once again, more ballots were ticking toward President Trump than the polls had projected. Though the voter surveys ultimately pointed in the wrong direction for only two states—North Carolina and Florida, both of which had signaled a win for Joe Biden—they incorrectly gauged just how much of the overall vote would go to Trump in both red and blue states. In states where polls had favored Biden, the vote margin went to Trump by a median of 2.

And in Republican states, Trump did even better than the polls had indicated—by a whopping 6. Four years ago, Sam Wang, a neuroscience professor at Princeton University and co-founder of the blog Princeton Election Consortium, which analyzes election polling, called the race for Clinton. He was so confident that he made a bet to eat an insect if Trump won more than electoral votes—and ended up downing a cricket live on CNN. Wang is coy about any plans for arthropod consumption in , but his predictions were again optimistic: he pegged Biden at electoral votes and projected that the Democrats would have 53 Senate seats and a 4.

Scientific American recently spoke with Wang about what may have gone wrong with the polls this time around—and what bugs remain to be sorted out. How did the polling errors for the election compare with those we saw in the contest? Broadly, there was a polling error of about 2. The main thing that has changed since is not the polling but the political situation. I would say that worrying about polling is, in some sense, worrying about the problem.

And the problem is ensuring there is a full and fair count and ensuring a smooth transition. Still, there were significant errors.

This has been pretty consistent. It happened in Poll Twitter tends to ascribe these mystical powers to these different pollsters. They call a bunch of random numbers, roughly 1 percent of people pick up the phone, and then they ask stuff like education, and age, and race, and gender, sometimes household size. And then they weight it up to the census, because the census says how many adults do all of those things. But it turns out that people who answer surveys are really weird.

They also have higher levels of social trust. They get a 70 percent response rate. We can basically believe what they say. And if you do phone surveys, and you weight, you will get that 50 percent of people say that people can be trusted.

This has always been true. It just used to not matter. But then, starting in , suddenly that shifted. If you look at white people without college education, high-trust non-college whites tended toward [Democrats], and low-trust non-college whites heavily turned against us. In , we were polling this high-trust electorate, so we overestimated Clinton.

If you look at why, I think the answer is related, which is that people who answer phone surveys are considerably more politically engaged than the overall population. If you match to vote history, literally 95 percent of people who answer phone surveys vote.

If you restrict to people who have never voted in an election before, 70 percent of phone survey takers vote. If you restrict to people who say they will definitely not vote, 76 percent of those people vote. In , they broke. There were very, very high levels of political engagement by liberals during Covid.

You can see in the data it really happened around March. He thinks there is a media deep state that is obsessed with hiding the truth. He will always paint a series of political delusions to reinforce his own mindset, and in that mindset there is a path for him to win. Is Trump right? Are they wrong like they were in ? Polling is as much an art as a science; unfortunately some artists are really bad, and others ignore the science. Look at the FiveThirtyEight website—they basically look at all the polling out there, and then they come up with a probability model of who is going to win based on that polling.

But if the polling is wrong, then the subsequent model is wrong. So you have to ask yourself: What percentage of voters is the least likely to tell pollsters the truth? National polls are absolutely, utterly useless and worthless. They will consistently show a Biden lead, by a small amount or a large amount, because all of the blue states, like California and New York, are going to go overwhelmingly to Biden.

In my opinion, national polls should be banned from existence in the last month of an election. And I would say that it has not been a central theme of this Presidency, and it was certainly not a central theme of the campaign.

So it makes sense to me that if we stop talking immigration and Hispanic voters start assessing the President without that in mind, that they might begin to shift in ways that are fairly similar to demographically similar white voters, but four years later.

That strikes me as a possibility. And it would also perhaps suggest that it was more Hispanic men than Hispanic women, correct? If you were to choose a year that was dominated by immigration during his Presidency, what year would that be?

I think there was a period in late where immigration was at the forefront of our politics. I would absolutely say that was untrue of , and I think it was also untrue of a lot of the Trump Administration. And I would say that immigration was always near the top in But Republicans seemed to do better than Trump in the generic House vote, and in some of these Senate races. Why do you think that was? I think one of the most interesting parts of the polling error this year is that it was greater down-ballot than it was as at the top of the ticket, and in it was the opposite.

This year with your polling for the New York Times , with other polling, there were a lot of misses. And these were the polls that really took weighting by education seriously and took a lot of steps after to fix errors, and in your case nailed the midterms. Do you know what happened this time? But, before I say that, I do want to agree that this was a much bigger polling miss, in important ways, than in It was a bigger polling miss in the national surveys. The state polling error will be just as bad, even though, as you mentioned, many state pollsters took steps to increase the number of white voters without a degree in their surveys.

And state polls look a lot like they did in Or, if you prefer, if all the pollsters were using the methodology, the polls would have been far worse this year than they were in And that is really interesting. As I said, I can list a bunch of theories for you.

What would make the polls worse now than they were then? Think of all of the political engagement on the left, the millions of dollars that were spent to help Jon Ossoff in or to help Jaime Harrison in This portrays a tremendous increase in the level of political participation on the part of progressives.

We know that politically engaged voters are more likely to respond to surveys. And so it may be that as the Trump Presidency has totally energized the Democratic base, it has also led those same kinds of voters to increase their propensity to respond to political surveys. Another possibility is the high turnout this year.

This year, though, we have this huge increase in turnout, and most people have supposed that it was good for Joe Biden. Maybe it was good for Joe Biden. But I think we also have to be open to the idea that it was not good for Joe Biden. In Florida, where we were collecting turnout data live on Election Day, I can tell you with certainty that the electorate was more Republican than it was in , more than our polls projected, no matter your likely-voter methodology.

That may be true elsewhere in the country. It may not be.