Have the pollsters learned from their mistakes in the 2016 presidential election? Maybe. Maybe not.
Over the next eight months we'll see hundreds of horse-race polls between President Donald Trump and presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden. Here's a tip. Don't pay too much attention. The big miss we saw in 2016 can happen again—the coronavirus pandemic could make this election more unpredictable—and there's only so much pollsters can do about it.
The first signs that something was screwy in 2016 occurred during the primaries, when New York Senator Hillary Clinton, who led the polls in Michigan by an average of 21 points according to RealClearPolitics, lost to Bernie Sanders by a point and a half. It's been called one of the biggest misses in polling history.
Academics who studied the election believe that's exactly what happened. One of the authors of a 2019 study, Yphtach Lelkes, assistant professor of communication and political science at the University of Pennsylvania, says,"Even though a traditional poll may say that a candidate is going to win only by a few points, let's say 52–48, the equivalent probabilistic outcome may be a 70 percent chance that the candidate will win. People perceive this as a sure thing.
In hindsight, the miss with regard to better-educated vs. less-educated voters was, if not an excusable error, at least an understandable one. The report found that in 2012, the less educated and the highly educated voted similarly, so in 2016 some pollsters didn't split them out. Nathaniel Rakich, elections analyst at FiveThirtyEight says,"A really big gap opened up between educated and non-educated and some polls didn't weight by education.
A year after the election, Sean McElwee , Matt McDermott and Will Jordan came to the same conclusion in a piece written for Vox:"The Comey effect was real, it was big, and it probably cost Clinton the election." The Vox analysis found media coverage shifted radically after the Comey letter, both in tone and content.
For most, that means tweaks. The smaller miss in this year's Michigan primary could mean they've succeeded. Rakich says,"Hopefully [state-level] polling will do better this year." Pollsters have made no changes to deal with another Comey-like surprise, but they don't believe they need to.
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