The Asterisk on Kamala Harris’s Poll Numbers

They believe that they’ve learned from the mistakes of 2020. Of course, they believed they had learned the hard way last time.

By Gilad Edelman

Aug 22, 2024 07:07 PM

One month after her entry into running for the presidency, Kamala Harris has a tiny but definite lead in the race against Donald Trump, if the polls are believed to be accurate. But, following the last two presidential elections, relying on the polls could be an odd thing to do.

The 2016 election is etched in the popular consciousness as the most notorious polling mishap ever, however 2020 was a far more shrewd choice. The polls of four years ago were wildly underestimating Trump’s popularity even though they correctly predicted the possibility of a Joe Biden win. A detailed review conducted by the American Association for Public Opinion Research concluded that the 2020 polls were among the most inaccurate polls in a long time, exaggerating Biden’s edge in the average by 3.9 percentage points nationwide in the United States and 4.3 percentage points in the state level in the final 2 weeks before the presidential election. (In 2016 however the national polls predicted Hillary Clinton’s popular vote margin very accurately.) As per the New York Times, Biden led by 10 points in Wisconsin but lost by less than a point. He was ahead in Michigan by 8 points and then won by three points; he was ahead in Pennsylvania by 5 points and was able to win by about a single point. In the moment of time, Harris is up in all three states, however in a smaller amount then Biden was. If she was to make a mistake of the size of 2020, it would indicate that she’s actually in decline and likely to lose in the Electoral College.

The pollsters realize they screwed with 2020. They’re optimistic the lessons they learned are applicable to their next attempt. Of course, they believed they had learned from their mistakes the last time.

What caused the polls to get worse from 2016 until 2020, while everyone was watching? In the aftermath of Trump’s surprise 2016 victory, the public-opinion-research industry concluded that the problem was educational polarization. When polling companies had been making it a effort to include the majority of white people with no college degrees in their sample they wouldn’t have misjudged Trump in such a way. In the race for 2020 they were focused on repairing this error.

It was not a success. While polls in 2020 showed a higher percentage of white college-educated voters, they proved to be more disproportionately non-college educated whites who preferred Biden. There is a consensus the fact that Republican electors are not as likely be responsive to polls at all regardless of their education levels. (To say it in a more geeky way it is true that partisan preferences correlate independently with the willingness to take any poll, if only during the time that Trump has been voted on.) Don Levy, the director of the Siena College Research Institute, who conducts polls for the benefit of The New York Times, refers to the phenomenon as “anti-establishment response bias.” The more a person is distrustful of establishment institutions like pollsters and the media as well as pollsters, and the less likely they will be to choose Trump.

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Levy said to me that in the year 2020, those answering the phones for Siena often reported instances of being verbally abused by untrustworthy Trump supporters. “In plain English, it was not uncommon for someone to say, ‘I’m voting for Trump–fuck you,'” and then to hang up before they could complete the remainder of the questionnaire the reporter said. (So far from that “shy Trump voter” hypothesis.) In the year 2020, these responses weren’t considered. In 2019 they’re. Levy informed me that including the “partials” in 2020 would have erased about half of the error rate in Siena’s study.

There’s still the other half. Another problem is that the majority of pollsters have opted out of live phone calls and have instead opted for polls via text or online and therefore have no angry partials to add. Therefore, pollsters are attempting different versions of the same strategy that is aimed at bringing more likely Trump voters into their database. If a smaller percent of Republicans are responding to polls then perhaps you need to contact a greater percentage of voters.

It may sound like a simple thing however it is an uneasy shift in the field. Public pollsters have historically adhered to the neutral categories that are used in censuses when they were assembling or weighting their surveys including gender, age or race and other such categories. The thought suggested that if one constructed your population correctly on different demographic lines, if you counted the right amount of whites and Latinos as well as evangelicals and atheists both women and men–an exact picture of the country’s the balance of power would be evident.

“In 2016, the feeling was that the problem we had was not capturing non-college-educated white voters, particularly in the Midwest,” Chris Jackson as the head of U.S. public polling at Ipsos said to me. “But the message 2020 gave us is that it’s not enough. There’s some sort of political-behavior aspect that wasn’t accounted for in the crosstab of education by race. What the whole industry has done is that we’ve been looking more closely at the political factors.”

They were previously reluctant to incorporate such variables due to the fact that predicting the partisan composition of the electorate was a hazy science. If it wasn’t there was no need for polls in the first instance. However, after the failure of 2020, the polling industry has no other option. “There’s no avoiding coming up with a hypothesis as to the composition of the electorate,” Matt Knee, who is the director of polls and analytics for Republican campaigns and me. “Choosing to throw up your hands on the most important predictor of how someone’s going to vote, and saying ‘That’s not a valid thing to include in my hypothesis,’ just doesn’t make sense.”

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Some pollsters are using voter lists at the state level to gain the proper mix between Democrats and Republicans in their sample. Another method is to utilize “recalled vote”: asking those who voted in 2020 and ensuring that the composition of responses is in line against the real results. (If the state voted 60 percent in favor of Trump for instance, and only 50 percent respondents indicate that they voted Trump then the pollster will orally call more Trump voters or weigh their responses more significantly after the fact.)

Each method has its own limitations. The registration of parties doesn’t align perfectly with voter preferences. Some states, such as Michigan and Wisconsin do not even have a party registration system, which means pollsters rely on models of the partisanship of voters based on variables such as gender, age and religion. The recall vote could be less certain: A large number of people make up or deny their voting habits. A lot of people claim that they voted but they really didn’t, and some voters who voted for the winner will claim they were the one who voted. Levy said that when Siena tried using a recalled votes at the time of 2022 influenced certain result less precise.

But pollsters can see some evidence of optimism. “People who told us they voted for Trump in 2020 are responding at the same rates as people who told us they voted for Biden in 2020,” said Jackson from Ipsos the polling company, which “suggests we’re not having a really strong systemic bias.” The New York Timespoll master Nate Cohn made a similar observation in an interview with The New Yorker. interview with The New Yorker: Democrats were significantly more likely to take part in Timespolls for 2020 however in this election, “it’s fairly even–so I’m cautiously optimistic that this means that we don’t have a deep, hidden non-response bias.” Another distinction between 2020 and the present the present is that there’s no pandemic. Certain experts consider there is a possibility that Democratic people were much more likely take part in questions in 2020 due to the fact that there was a higher likelihood to Republicans to be home and have nothing else to do.

The thing that is clear is that the race isn’t over yet as Harris has a more favorable place over Biden was. Natalie Jackson, a Democratic pollster at GQR Research, told me that if Harris’s results were merely a result of enthusiastic Democrats getting ready to respond to polls and take part in polls, then Democrats would see an identical increase in general congressional polls. However, the fact that they’re not indicates that the shift is real. “Trump’s numbers haven’t moved,” Jackson declared. “This is all shifting from third party or undecided to Democrat.”

As Olympic athletes Political pollsters also are able to spend four years perfecting their skills, but they don’t know whether their efforts were effective until it’s too late change anything. The bias of non-response that dominated the 2020 polls isn’t easy to eliminate. The pollsters are by definition only a little about those who don’t speak to them. If Trump beats the polls time, it’s due to the fact that even after all these years there is something about his supporters that is still a mystery.