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But I didn’t actually mention what screws we’ve tightened this cycle. Here’s a quick summary:

We’re weighting on method of voting in 2020 — whether people voted by mail, early or absentee. It’s an important predictor of vote choice, even after considering the partisanship of a registrant. Registered Republicans who voted on Election Day, for instance, were more likely to back Donald J. Trump than those who voted by mail. Weighting on this in 2020 wouldn’t have made a major difference, but it would have brought some of our polls about half a point or so closer to the final result.

We now use additional information about the attitudes of respondents in determining whether they’re likely to vote, including whether respondents are undecided; whether their views about the president align with their party; whether they like the candidate they intend to vote for; whether they back the party out of power in a midterm; and so on, all based on previous Times/Siena polls. At the same time, we now give even more weight to a respondent’s track record of voting than we did in the past.

We’re changing how we characterize people who attended trade or vocational school but did not receive a college degree (Wonkiness rating: 6.5/10). The effect is a slight increase in the weight given to Republican-leaning voters without any post-high-school training, and a decrease in the weight given to the somewhat fewer Republican voters who attended some college or received an associate degree.

This is a little complicated. Basically, pollsters need to decide whether people who went to technical or vocational school count as “high school graduates” or “some college” when they’re adjusting their surveys to make sure they have the right number of voters by educational group. They have to choose, because the Census Bureau doesn’t count a trade or vocational school as a level of educational attainment. In the view of the Census Bureau, that puts them in the category of high school graduates. The Times/Siena poll (and many other pollsters) previously counted them the same way.

But this choice isn’t necessarily straightforward. Whether it’s the right choice in practice depends on whether census interviewers and respondents handle this question the way the census would like. If you completed a professional technical program at, say, Renton Technical College, there’s a chance you selected one of the various “some college” options on the census American Community Survey or the Current Population Survey.

I’d like to run an experiment on this at some point, but for the moment we’re moving respondents like these into the “some college” category. By doing so, we modestly increase the weight we give to those categorized as high school graduates (who are pretty Republican), and decrease the weight on the other group (who still lean Republican but somewhat less so). Unfortunately, had we done this, it would have improved our result by only about a quarter of a point in 2020 — despite the number of words I just dedicated to the topic.

On a totally different topic, we now consider the source of cellphones in determining whom we’ll call (Wonkiness rating: 8/10). This is the last point in this newsletter, so you can go on with the rest of your day if your eyes are glazing over, but I think it might be the most interesting to a subset of you, especially those who conduct polls.