Polling accuracy:
Accuracy in question following 2016 outcome
Surveys show Trump running behind, but they showed the same in 2016.
WASHINGTON – Joe Biden can look at the polls and smile.
Cautiously.
A double-digit advantage in numerous national surveys, solid leads in a number of battlegrounds and competitive showings in states Donald Trump carried handily in 2016 suggest the presumptive Democratic nominee is the favorite to win in November.
The overwhelming majority of polls four years ago indicated Trump would lose as well. So why put much faith in the 2020 polls that show the former vice president consistently on top?
David Burgess of Kittery, Maine, said he stopped believing polls after the 2016 presidential election.
“They predicted Hillary Clinton would win, and she didn’t,” Burgess said while taking a stroll in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. “Voters are like an iceberg. (With polls), you just see the tip of the iceberg. You don’t see the rest of the iceberg. You don’t know who they’re going to vote for.”
Pollsters said lessons they learned from 2016’s failings.
“The public understandably walked away from 2016 feeling like polls were broken. And there’s some truth to that,” said Courtney Kennedy, director of survey research at the Pew Research Center. “But it’s not the case that 2016 meant that polling writ large doesn’t work anymore.”
Charles Franklin, director of the Marquette Law School poll, one of many that showed Clinton with a lead, said 2016 is “a reason to be very cautious.”
The pollsters then had Clinton winning the popular vote by about 3 percentage points. She won by 2.1 points. And they were right about the outcome in most states. But their research did not capture the full picture of voter sentiment in the upper Midwest that provided Trump with the margin of victory in the Electoral College.
Polls in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin showed Clinton winning consistently. Of 104 published polls that surveyed voters in those three states from August to the election, 101 had Clinton winning, two were tied, and one (in Pennsylvania) showed Trump with a slight lead. Many fell within the margin of error, but 15 had Clinton up by double digits at some point.
Trump won all three states by a combined 77,744 votes out of 13,940,912 cast.
Ronna Mcdaniel, who chairs the Republican National Committee, dismissed the 2020 polls, given what happened four years ago.
“One hundred and fifty polls were done between now and the election in 2016 that showed Donald Trump losing, and the ultimate poll is Election Dayt,” she told Fox Business channel.
Kennedy and Franklin said two large factors complicated the accuracy of the 2016 polls: Many surveys tended to over-sample college-educated voters (who favored Clinton), and many failed to capture the late-deciding voters (who generally swung to Trump).