Source: Politics<\/p>\n
Pollsters know they have a problem. But they aren\u2019t sure they\u2019ve fixed it in time for the November election.<\/p>\n
Since Donald Trump\u2019s unexpected 2016 victory, pre-election polls have consistently understated support for Republican candidates, compared to the votes ultimately cast.<\/p>\n
Once again, polls over the past two months are showing Democrats running stronger than once expected in a number of critical midterm races. It\u2019s left some wondering whether the rosy results are setting the stage for another potential polling failure that dashes Democratic hopes of retaining control of Congress\u2014 and vindicates the GOP\u2019s assertion that the polls are unfairly biased against them.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not that pollsters haven\u2019t tried to fix the issues that plagued them in recent elections. Whether they\u2019re public firms conducting surveys for the media and academic instructions or private campaign consultants, they have spent the past two years tweaking their methods to avoid a 2020 repeat.<\/p>\n
But most of the changes they have made are small. Some pollsters are hoping that since Trump isn\u2019t running in the midterms, the problems of underestimating Republicans\u2019 vote share will disappear with him. But others worry that Trump\u2019s ongoing dominance of the news cycle \u2014 from the FBI seizure of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago to litigation against his businesses in New York \u2014 effectively is making him the central political figure going into Election Day.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s no question that the polling errors in [20]16 and [20]20 worry the polling profession, worry me as a pollster,\u201d said Charles Franklin, the director of the Marquette Law School Poll in Milwaukee and a longtime survey-taker in the battleground state of Wisconsin. \u201cThe troubling part is how much of that is unique to when Donald Trump is on the ballot, versus midterms when he is not on the ballot.\u201d<\/p>\n
After 2016, pollsters said the problem<\/a> was their samples included too few voters without college degrees. The polls were better for the 2018 midterms, though they were still too Democratic on balance.<\/p>\n Then came 2020 \u2014 which was worse than 2016, and for which pollsters have yet to settle on a definitive explanation<\/a> of what precisely went wrong. As a result, an easy fix<\/a> has proven elusive. But pollsters have mostly agreed that, particularly in 2020, the surveys missed a chunk of Trump\u2019s voters who refused to participate in polls.<\/p>\n The current 2022 polling is wildly favorable for Democrats. FiveThirtyEight\u2019s \u201clite\u201d prediction model<\/a>, which is based solely on the latest polling data, says Democrats have a 79 percent chance to retain control of the Senate. That probability clashes with the expectations of both parties and most independent handicappers, who consider the battle for the chamber to be closer to a coin flip.<\/p>\n And the New York Times noted<\/a> that some of Democrats\u2019 strongest numbers are coming in the states that have seen the greatest polling misses over the past few elections.<\/p>\n Celinda Lake, a prominent Democratic pollster, told POLITICO that her firm, Lake Research Partners, is working hard to get the right balance of voters in its samples \u2014 but that a certain segment of Trump voters is increasingly elusive, especially as the former president\u2019s exploits have preoccupied the headlines lately.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was less [of an issue] for a long time,\u201d Lake said. \u201cIt looks to us like it is getting to be more of a problem recently, with the Mar-a-Lago thing, with his candidates winning a lot of these primaries, with the Jan. 6 committee.\u201d<\/p>\n Her firm isn\u2019t alone in working to mitigate these issues. Quinnipiac University in Connecticut, a longtime player in political polling, released polls last week showing Sen. Raphael Warnock<\/a> (D-Ga.) leading GOP nominee Herschel Walker<\/a> by 6 percentage points, despite other surveys showing a tied race or even a narrow Walker advantage, and Democrats with big leads in both major statewide races in Connecticut<\/a>.<\/p>\n Doug Schwartz, director of the Quinnipiac University poll, said his interviewers have changed the way they ask respondents about their vote choice, taking care to separate those who say they are undecided from those who refuse to answer the question outright.<\/p>\n \u201cIn the end, we\u2019re hoping to reduce that percentage of people that don\u2019t give us a response on the horse-race,\u201d Schwartz said, pointing out that while they accurately reflected Biden\u2019s share of the vote in their 2020 pre-election polls, the large number of refusals led them to underestimate Trump\u2019s. Quinnipiac had now-President Joe Biden leading Trump in two states Trump would carry, Florida and Ohio, on the eve of the election<\/a>.<\/p>\n Another Northeastern academic pollster, Marist College, released two polls last week: one showing Warnock ahead of Walker by 5 points<\/a>, and the other showing Ohio GOP Senate nominee J.D. Vance running neck-and-neck<\/a> with Democratic Rep. Tim Ryan<\/a>.<\/p>\n Marist also had some 2020 misses, showing Biden leading by 6 points in North Carolina (which he lost) and by 5 points in Pennsylvania (which he won by 1 point) in polls conducted for NBC News. Since 2020, Marist\u2019s Lee Miringoff said the school has diversified its sampling by contacting voters not just via telephone calls, but also text and online interviews.<\/p>\n Miringoff told POLITICO he isn\u2019t as worried about the same non-response bias \u2014 the segment of Trump voters who won\u2019t participate in polls, systematically skewing the results toward Democrats \u2014 showing up this year. That\u2019s because, he said, Trump himself isn\u2019t on the ballot, and Democrats have mostly erased the GOP\u2019s enthusiasm advantage this summer.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m pretty comfortable that what may have been the case in previous elections may not be the case this time in terms of the misses,\u201d said Miringoff.<\/p>\n In the last midterm election, the most prolific pollster was Siena College in Upstate New York, thanks to an ambitious, roughly $2 million \u201clive polling\u201d project with the New York Times to survey dozens of congressional districts<\/a>. In all, the Times and Siena conducted just shy of 100 polls that accurately portrayed Democrats\u2019 momentum in their successful bid to flip the House majority.<\/p>\n This year, Siena is doing swing-state polling both with and without the Times, including two new polls last week in Wisconsin<\/a> and Texas<\/a> conducted for Spectrum News, cable company Charter Communications\u2019 local news outlets.<\/p>\n Don Levy, director of the Siena College Research Institute, said he is being \u201cas careful as careful can be\u201d to increase the share of Trump voters, both in their sampling (who gets called to participate) and weighting (making them count for more after the interviews are conducted in order to fix their underrepresentation). It\u2019s not enough, Levy said, to just call more Republicans, since it\u2019s a specific kind of Republican whom they are struggling to reach.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s not partisan nonresponse. It\u2019s hardened Trump-backer nonresponse,\u201d said Levy. \u201cA small majority of those are self-identified Republicans, but a significant number of them are self-identified independents or Democrats. You can\u2019t correct that by saying, \u2018Let\u2019s weight up the Republicans.\u2019 That doesn\u2019t work.\u201d<\/p>\n Monmouth University, in New Jersey, is trying a different tack \u2014 eschewing horse-race polling for surveys that measure each candidate\u2019s level of support without pitting them against one another. Patrick Murray, the director of the school\u2019s polling institute, said his analysis of the 2020 results didn\u2019t reveal a \u201csilver bullet\u201d for fixing their poll, which also failed to predict the closer-than-expected New Jersey governor\u2019s race last year.<\/p>\n Murray cautioned that pollsters who haven\u2019t given up the horse-race that the dynamics of this year\u2019s midterms are different than in the last election \u2014 and are likely to be different from the next one in two years. \u201cIf the 2022 polls are good,\u201d he said, \u201cit does not necessarily mean we fixed what went wrong in 2020.\u201d<\/p>\n Franklin, the Wisconsin pollster, said\u00a0he\u2019s made \u201cmoderate or marginal adjustments\u201d to the Marquette Law School poll\u2019s methodology, including increasing the percentage of respondents contacted by cell phone. He\u2019s also paying close attention to the response rate for his polls in Wisconsin counties that went more heavily for Trump in the last election \u2014 but thus far, voters there aren\u2019t participating in lower numbers.<\/p>\n Another significant polling miss \u201cwill continue to be damaging to the reputation of polling,\u201d said Franklin. \u201cI think that\u2019s just obvious and undeniable.\u201d<\/p>\n It may also be inevitable. Partisan campaign pollsters in both parties suggested Trump voters are again difficult to capture in the run-up to this election.<\/p>\n \u201cThere is a good chance that a lot of the publicly released surveys are overstating Democratic strength,\u201d said Glen Bolger, a Republican pollster at the firm Public Opinion Strategies.<\/p>\n Amanda Iovino, a Republican pollster at WPA Intelligence who worked on now-Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin\u2019s race last fall, added, \u201cIt\u2019s still easier to get college-educated voters on the phone\u201d than voters who didn\u2019t graduate from college.<\/p>\n Lake, the Democratic pollster, said she sees the measures that her colleagues are implementing to get the right mix of voters. But she isn\u2019t sure that they will be enough to avert another 2020-style polling miss.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m confident that they\u2019re the right things,\u201d said Lake. \u201cI\u2019m not confident that they\u2019re sufficient.\u201d<\/p>\n But some Democrats are daring not just to believe in the polls \u2014 but hoping that the party may actually overperform in November, pointing to two special congressional election wins last month in Alaska and New York, where polls showed Republicans ahead going into Election Day.<\/p>\n \u201cYou just saw the polls underestimate the victories in both Alaska and in Upstate New York,\u201d Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney<\/a> (D-N.Y.), chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said in an interview at a POLITICO Pro Premium Roundtable event earlier this month. \u201cSo, if anything, the polls may be showing a conservative bias right now.\u201d<\/p>\n