But while it may seem easy to again point fingers at poorly crafted surveys for the tighter-than-expected race, the accuracy and utility of polling, like the unfolding 2020 election result, is more complicated. On the one hand, many of the polls that predicted Biden winning in certain states were correct, said Enos. And many of them also accurately predicted close races in others. “So we shouldn’t jump to the conclusion that the polls were wrong, because they sort of delivered the information they were supposed to deliver,” he said.
On the other hand, he added, “There are going to be really big misses,” both in terms of the polling for congressional seats and the presidency. He singled out Susan Collins’ Senate race in Maine, where surveys consistently had the incumbent down by 10 percentage points (Collins appears to have won by about 9), and the presidential race in Michigan, where pollsters steadily put Biden up by 12. (The Associated Press called the Midwest state for Biden, with a winning margin of just under 3 percentage points.)
What’s important to keep in mind, said Enos, is that polling, is “really, really hard,” and when you’re trying to estimate population opinion by a very specific group of people in a very specific place, under restrictions from a pandemic like COVID-19, and voter enthusiasm attached to polarizing political figure like Trump, the “harder it is to get right.”
“We don’t exactly have the technology available to us in the polling industry right now to get these answers as right as people would like them.”
Despite the frustration voiced by many, Chase H. Harrison, preceptor in survey research in the department of government and associate director of the Program on Survey Research at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science, agrees with Enos that the 2020 polling may not have been that far off.
“My sense heading into the 2020 election was that the forecast models had a narrow possibility that you would see something like a huge Democratic sweep; a narrow possibility that Donald Trump would win the election; and somewhat of a more likely possibility that there would be some number of states voting for Biden,” said Harrison, who cautions that without the full vote count completed, it’s still too soon to determine whether polls were, in fact, truly misleading.
In 2016, poor poll design gave Clinton a huge edge, Harrison told the Gazette in September. He pointed out that many polls in the battleground states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania underestimated the level of support for Trump. Typically people with college degrees have higher response rates to surveys, and pollsters failed to sufficiently factor in the gap in education levels between many Trump and Clinton supporters. This year Harrison believes polling organizations have corrected those errors and put more comprehensive predictive modeling systems in place.
"bad" - Google News
November 06, 2020 at 07:39AM
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Harvard experts weigh the good and bad of political predictions - Harvard Gazette
"bad" - Google News
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