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Is polling broken?
2016 and 2020 has just proven that.
Or, the polls always get wrong anything related to Trump.Yes. Yes. and Yes.
Trump voters reluctant to acknowledge their support and traditional polling metrics and procedures are obsolete. They don’t accurately select “likely voters” from both sides and their sampling universe misses “cord-cutters” who no longer have a landline phone. Finally, questions are unlikely to yield accurate responses.
Other than the foregoing problems, they are great sources of useless informationThe system relied on ability to same the population accurately, and on the almost one-to-one relationship of phones to households. The introduction of cell phones undermined that.
Also, in the past the mass media were politically neutral, but now almost none of them are. People tend to tell pollsters the “right answer” based on what the pollster is perceived as expecting to hear, so if the media trend to be left-wing, the polling results tend to favor left-wing candidates and positions. This has shown to be a factor in many countries, including Israel and Britain.
Rather than speculate, look at the polls from Real Clear Politics vs. the actual vote counts.
Final RCP Average in PA: Biden +1.2. Actual election result: Biden +1.2.
MI: Polls Biden +4.2 Actual Biden +2.8.
GA: Polls Trump +1.0 Actual Biden +0.3.
NC: Polls Trump +0.2 Actual Trump +1.3.
AZ: Polls Biden +0.9 Actual Biden +0.3.
WI: Polls Biden +6.7 Actual Biden +0.7.
NV: Polls Biden +2.3 Actual Biden +2.7.So the only state among the close ones that was really off was Wisconsin. Which had a similar discrepancy four years ago.
charliehall: The Democrat left was calling RCP polling averages fake in favor of Republicans, while promoting the FiveThirtyEight averages the left favored. And 538 along with left leaning polling firms were way off base whereas the more right leaning firms were closer to the truth,
Republican polls were off, too. Trafalgar had Trump winning PA by 2, GA by 5, NV by 1, NC by 2, MI by 2, AZ by 3. The did come close in WI, getting Biden +1 there.
Susquehanna had Trump winning PA by 1, and Biden winning WI by 3.
Rasmussen had Biden winning PA by 3, and Trump winning NC by 1. But they had Biden +1 in the national popular vote; he won by 4.
Bottom line: polling in America is dead. Good riddance to them.
Both in 2016 and 2020 the FiveThirtyEight polls were the most accurate. They broke things down by state, and got about 80% of all states right with the remaining 20% well within the margin of error.
Withheld: Polls were broken long before 2016 and 2020. 2016 got worse than before and 2020 got worse than even 2020. However true this was for the presidential races, and it was very bad and especially bad for state by state polls of the presidential contest, this was especially even more true for non-presidential races such as Senatorial, Congressional and gubernatorial elections, where the polls were very often a sad joke.
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