Have the Democrats learned their lesson from 2016 and 2020? In both presidential contests, Democrats predicted relatively easy victories for Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. But when the votes were counted, Hillary Clinton had been defeated and Joe Biden just eked out a narrow and, for some, controversial victory.
Now, Democrats are looking at Kamala Harris's lead in several swing states and fear a similar scenario is unfolding.
“Polling has really been seriously damaged since 2016. And that’s one of the truths, is that Trump is going to be tough in Pennsylvania, and that’s absolutely the truth,” Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) said when asked whether pollsters may be undercounting Trump’s support in Pennsylvania.
Part of the problem is that many Americans, including a large number of Republicans, refuse to respond when the pollsters call. That presents a huge problem for pollsters who must "weight" the responses they get to receive an accurate picture of the race: fewer GOP responses mean a less accurate poll.
There's also a problem with being able to contact enough respondents who no longer use landlines and block pollsters on their mobile phones. Pollsters are trying texts and QR codes to fill out their surveys but in 2024, it's still a major issue.
"There's no way anymore to get a representative sample of the U.S. population or the voters from a single mode," Cameron McPhee, chief methodologist for SSRS, observed. "There are too many technologies out there. There are too many beliefs and preferences and attitudes and feelings about responding in general and responding by different modes."
At issue are the "Blue Wall" states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. In 2016 and 2020, pollsters gave the Democratic candidate a small but significant lead going into election day. In 2016, Trump upended the polls, and he came very close to doing the same thing in 2020.
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“We know this election is going to be close. It’s going to be close in the battleground states, including Georgia, which is why I’m doing everything I can to make sure we put Georgia in our column,” Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) said. “The only poll that matters is Nov. 5, right?
“We talk about margin of error for a reason,” he added.
One Democratic senator who requested anonymity acknowledged both Clinton and President Biden were doing better in the polls against Trump in 2016 and 2020, respectively, than Harris is performing right now.
“That’s ominous. There’s no question that is concerning, but you’re working as hard as you can work, no matter what. My sense there’s not a lot more you can do than we’re already doing,” the lawmaker said.
The Democratic senator said pollsters have trouble gauging Trump’s support because many voters who support him may not want to interact with them or don’t want to speak candidly about their political views.
Pollsters have various means to gauge how candid a respondent is to their questions. It was a much smaller issue than the non-response rate of Trump supporters.
In its post-2020 report, AAPOR cited nonresponse bias as one of the potential reasons for the cycle's larger polling error, possibly because Democrats were systematically more likely to respond to pollsters than Republicans, and because the Republicans who did answer may have differed in important ways from the Republicans who didn't. The 2020 election's record-setting turnout amid the COVID-19 pandemic also complicated pollsters' efforts to get a read on just who was most likely to vote, as states expanded mail-in voting and Trump's presidency likely motivated higher turnout among both supporters and opponents.
"About 13 percent of voters in Wisconsin, Florida and Pennsylvania decided on their presidential vote" the last week of the campaign, claimed an "Evaluation of 2016 Election Polls in the United States." The number of undecideds breaking late for Trump in 2020 was also significant but not enough to catch Biden's early lead due to mail-in ballots.
No wonder Democrats are worried.
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