“People forget that large swaths of our fellow citizens don’t vote. But a lot of them still participate in polls,” said Kennedy, who led a review of the 2016 polling for the American Association for Public Opinion Research . “So there’s a big (gap) that even the best pollsters struggle to model away.”
While changes are in progress, Murray said it’s wise not to dramatically revamp polls that are already largely on target.
“There are some errors that we’ll never be able to account for because they happen idiosyncratically in each election. They’re different each time,” he said. “So you just want to be careful that you don’t over-correct for your last mistake because that’s not the one that’s going to happen this time around.”
Despite the 2016 stumble, most polls in 2018 showing Democrats retaking the House and Republicans keeping the Senate proved accurate. Even so, pollsters caution that surveys are simply snapshots – not predictors – and that some are better than others at revealing voters’ deeper attitudes on issues and candidates.
But polls can influence voting behavior.
“It felt OK to cast a protest vote or just not turn out,” Schaffner said. “Some people felt more at liberty to cast a vote that they think wasn’t going to matter.”
FiveThirtyEight, which analyzes opinion polling, warns not all polls are the same .
It recommends consumers look at who’s being polled (adults, registered voters, likely voters), check the track record of the pollsters, and pay close attention to the margin of error. A poll that shows Biden up by two points over Trump and has a four-point margin of error means Biden could be up as much as six points or be trailing Trump by two.
Keeping ‘their opinions to themselves’
Ellen Chaput, a nurse who lives in Portsmouth, said she hopes polls showing Biden with a lead over Trump are accurate. But she doesn’t believe them.
“They’ve got it wrong before,” she said. “I don’t pay any attention to them.”
Even if Biden is ahead right now, “things can change,” she said.
Helaine Dandrea, a pharmaceutical consultant from Staten Island, New York, said polls often reflect the biases of the people who conduct them.
Dandrea, who is backing Trump for re-election, said polls that show Biden with a solid lead could be underestimating the president’s strength. Some Trump supporters may be unwilling to tell pollsters they are backing the president because they don’t want to face the inevitable backlash from the other side, she said.
“People tend to be afraid because there’s a lot of aggression,” she said. “People tend to keep their opinions to themselves.”
Jim Menard, a retiree from Salisbury, Massachusetts, who backs Biden, said he can see why Trump voters might want to keep their preference to themselves.
More: ‘Driven by re-election’: John Bolton book accuses Donald Trump of seeking foreign help for political gain
“I imagine they are kind of embarrassed to say they support him,” Menard said.
Menard suspects polls showing Biden with a comfortable lead are correct because be believes pollsters changed their methodology to get more accurate results, he said.
“They’ve gotten better at these polls since the last time,” he said.
Important to focus on ‘where things stand today’
Franklin said it’s also important to look beyond the top-line numbers of who’s in front and examine the deeper data that explores why voters feel the way they do.
Marquette’s June poll, for example, shows Biden with an eight-poll lead in Wisconsin : 49%-41% with a margin of error of 4.3 percentage points. That’s up from the three-point lead Biden had in May due mainly to declining support for Trump and growing opposition from independents.
The June poll shows 50% of Badger State voters approve of Trump’s handling of the economy (down from 54% in May), while 44% approve of his handling of the coronavirus crisis (the same as the previous month). But only 30% said they approved of his handling of protests over the death of George Floyd .
“If there’s a valuable lesson to learn from ’16, it’s to put less weight on what may happen in the unknown future and put more weight on where things stand today,” Franklin said.
More: About that running mate: 72% of Democrats in USA TODAY poll say it’s ‘important’ Biden pick woman of color
Murray, whose Monmouth poll released earlier this month is one of nearly a dozen in June showing Biden with a double-digit lead nationally, said the polling today centers on how voters view Trump because many have yet to learn much about the former vice president. That could change by October as the public gets to know more about Biden, he said.
“I think the polls are telling us a story about what’s going on and how people are dug in,” he said. “It doesn’t tell us how the Electoral College is going to turn out right now so that’s why you should continue to take the polling with a grain of salt if you’re looking ahead to November.”
Just as they did in 2016, polls in 2020 once again show Trump losing in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
The grain of salt? The same Marquette University Law School Poll that has Biden up by eight points in June showed Clinton up by nine four years ago.
Comments