TV news lives on polls, but I don’t think they are
accurate. They show to some extent what
some people are thinking, but they don’t necessarily predict the outcome of
elections unless there is a substantial spread between the responses. I would not even trust a 10%
differential.
I think there are many people, like myself, who do not
reaspond to poll questions, so the people polled are not representative, and
many do not respond honestly. Those who
do respond may strongly favor a candidte and thus tend to respond in wsys they
think will help their candidate, e.g. by saying what issues they think are
important.
One big problem is that most pollsters are elite Democrats
from left-leaning media or academia. Conservatives
sense this and when these leftist pollsters call, Republicans are not going to
cooperate with them, because they see them as the enemy. The pollsters have
contempt for the conservatives they interview and the interviewees know
that. Thus, polls tend to confirm whatever the political
elite thinks is a likely result. Pollsters
are unable to talk to those who don’t share their opinions.
Politico
has an article by Steven Shepard about the difficulties with polls. It says:
Pollsters
know they have a problem. But they aren’t sure they’ve fixed it in time for the
November election.
Since
Donald Trump’s unexpected 2016 victory, pre-election polls have consistently
understated support for Republican candidates, compared to the votes ultimately
cast.
Once again, polls over the
past two months are showing Democrats running stronger than once expected in a
number of critical midterm races. It’s left some wondering whether the rosy
results are setting the stage for another potential polling failure that dashes
Democratic hopes of retaining control of Congress— and vindicates the GOP’s
assertion that the polls are unfairly biased against them.
“There’s
no question that the polling errors in [20]16 and [20]20 worry the polling
profession, worry me as a pollster,” said Charles Franklin, the director of the
Marquette Law School Poll in Milwaukee and a longtime survey-taker in the
battleground state of Wisconsin. “The troubling part is how much of that is unique
to when Donald Trump is on the ballot, versus midterms when he is not on the
ballot.”
After
2016, pollsters said the problem was their samples included too few voters
without college degrees. The polls were better for the 2018 midterms, though
they were still too Democratic on balance.
Then came 2020 — which was
worse than 2016, and for which pollsters have yet to settle on a definitive explanation of what precisely went wrong. As a
result, an easy fix has
proven elusive. But pollsters have mostly agreed that, particularly in 2020,
the surveys missed a chunk of Trump’s voters who refused to participate in
polls.
And the New York Times noted that some of Democrats’ strongest numbers
are coming in the states that have seen the greatest polling misses over the
past few elections.
Partisan
campaign pollsters in both parties suggested Trump voters are again difficult
to capture in the run-up to this election.
“There
is a good chance that a lot of the publicly released surveys are overstating
Democratic strength,” said Glen Bolger, a Republican pollster at the firm
Public Opinion Strategies.
But
some Democrats are daring not just to believe in the polls — but hoping that
the party may actually overperform in November, pointing to two special
congressional election wins last month in Alaska and New York, where polls
showed Republicans ahead going into Election Day.
“You just saw the polls
underestimate the victories in both Alaska and in Upstate New York,”
Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (D-N.Y.), chair of the Democratic
Congressional Campaign Committee, said in an interview at a POLITICO Pro
Premium Roundtable event earlier this month. “So, if anything, the polls may be
showing a conservative bias right now.”