Polling

Live by the poll, die by the poll: Lessons from 2016

<embed>https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2019/12/1/1901962/-Live-by-the-poll-die-by-the-poll-Lessons-from-2016</embed> DailyKos 12/01/19

As we head into 2020, pollsters, along with the analysts and political junkies who consume their polls, hope to never repeat the national dismay that followed the unexpected outcome of 2016. Pollsters have identified many mistakes that year that they hope to correct for in 2020. But the takeaway for some more casual observers that polls are simply not to be trusted is neither accurate nor a useful response to a year that posed some unusual challenges. As many Daily Kos readers know, the national polling was actually pretty darn accurate, especially relative to polling from previous years. Check out the following graph from Pew Research Center. 

The real polling problem came at the state level and the good news is, a report analyzing 2016 missteps from the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) found that some of those problems can be corrected for moving forward. 

One of the biggest polling errors came to fruition because pollsters failed to take into account the fact that college graduates were more likely to respond to surveys than those with a less formal education. This is a bias that pollsters can adjust for and the failure to do that particularly skewed many critical state-level polls in 2016. As Pew Research Center writes: