Most political pollsters aren’t receiving compliments from the public at large about their predictions leading up to the 2024 presidential election. In fact, many people are questioning why the presidential polls were so off again this year after similar dismal performances in the 2020 and 2016 elections.
In 2020, the polls called for President Joe Biden winning by a landslide, but instead Biden won a close race. In 2016, the polls had arguably their most embarrassing performance in modern history, calling for Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton to win the race by a comfortable margin when in fact this was the case for President-elect Donald Trump when it came to the electoral college.
Dustin Olson, a managing partner with the Republican polling firm American Pulse who has done polling in Wyoming, said the biggest problem within the polling industry these days is that many pollsters could use a little more humility.
He also said pollsters must also put aside their own internal biases and the pressures of the organization they work for to seek out the most accurate results.
“You have to constantly question,” he said. “You have to be looking for what do you know, you know? What do you know, you don’t know? You can’t look for what you don’t know, you don’t know. You might just screw it up and just own it.”
Olson believes the polls were closer to 2016 predictions than 2020 this go-around but to be fair, the polling wasn’t completely wrong this election season. Most polls showed a neck-and-neck race between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris entering the last few weeks of the campaign. Trump ended up winning the electoral college by a comfortable margin, and the popular vote by a closer result, the first time a Republican candidate had done so for the latter since 2004.
Unresponsive Voters
One of the biggest hurdles pollsters must overcome every election is reaching a group of people that accurately represent the actual voting electorate. The people willing to participate in polls tend to be college educated, which creates a natural bias towards Democrats that pollsters must find a way to compensate for.
“I think every pollster that was being honest knew that we had an under-polling of Trump (support),” Olson said.
Even New York Times Chief Political Analyst Nate Cohn acknowledged this dynamic, writing on X (formerly Twitter), it’s difficult to track this “nonresponse bias.” Cohn said he tries to review the level at which Democrats and Republicans respond to pollsters to try to gain insights and referred to the 2020 results.
“Across these final polls, white Democrats were 16% likelier to respond than white Republicans,” he wrote shortly before Election Day. “It raises the possibility that the polls could underestimate Mr. Trump yet again. We do a lot to account for this, but in the end, there are no guarantees.”
Further, Olson found that “low propensity voters,” a group of casual voters who may skip elections and don’t have strong political views, were leaning towards Trump. It can be harder to track and reach these types of voters because they can engage in less voter registration and affiliation activities.
Using a variety of technology to reach prospective voters, including phone, internet and text, Olson said is much more accurate than simply relying on only one of these mechanisms. Also, following back to reach voters multiple times, he said, can make a big difference in reaching low propensity voters.
Still Valuable
Although public opinions about polling may have declined, people still pay attention to them as much as ever. One valuable service that they can provide is a play-by-play analysis of the political horse race before the actual election occurs, showing the ebbs and flows of support for each candidate.
When Harris first entered the race, she had a clear lead. By the time the Democratic National Convention arrived, her polling numbers were already starting to slip, Olson said. After Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced his support for Trump, she fell behind further in the polls.
RealClearPolitics, which provides an aggregate result of hundreds of polls, showed a clear shift toward Trump and an increase in non-responsive voters after Hillary Clinton likened a Trump rally held at Madison Square Garden in New York City in late October to a 1939 pro-Nazi event.
“When it becomes in a way unsafe to tell people who you’re voting for because you might be called a Nazi, you’re going to have a much higher number of people stop answering,” Olson said.
Another challenging factor, Olson said, is the ever-constant demographic shifts that occur between elections. This year, Trump did much better with male African-American and Latinos and young female voters than previous elections.
“Those folks were no longer those folks their (Democratic) machine could lean on,” Olson said.
Olson, who correctly predicted that Trump was “very likely” to win the popular vote and most of whose polls were within the margin of error for this year’s presidential election, said pollsters also need to make their surveys shorter.
“If you’re a single mom who works two shifts in a day and some news organization calls with a 25-minute survey, you don’t get to participate in that even if you wanted to,” Olson said. “If you have a two, three, four-minute survey, yeah you might be able to do that.”
That Iowa Poll
Pollster J. Ann Selzer caught significant heat for putting out a poll in the waning days of the election showing Harris leading by 3 percentage points in Iowa. In the actual vote, Trump won Iowa by 13 points.
“Ann Selzer’s problem was she didn’t have any humility,” Olson said. “She thought her methodology was perfect.”
Many people expressed skepticism about Selzer’s poll even before the election, pointing to the long-term Republican trajectory of the state and Trump’s strong performance there in the primary election.
Selzer announced on the Sunday after the election that she’s moving on “to other ventures and opportunities,” but also claimed she had made the decision to retire from polling a year prior to the election.
Olson said he respects Selzer’s career but found the methodologies she used to collect her data in this year’s poll outdated. Specifically, Selzer equated a person’s propensity to participate in a poll or not to their likelihood of voting. Olson said this is a flawed determination as conservatives tend to be more private about their political beliefs than progressives.
“That is just not the world that we live in today,” he said.
The work of a professional pollster never ends.
Olson said his firm is still conducting polls regarding the results of this year’s election. Once that completes, they’ll start dedicating time to conducting nonpolitical market research, another service his and other polling firms focus on during non-election times.
Leo Wolfson can be reached at leo@cowboystatedaily.com.
