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Topical for all the questions in this forum surrounding polling. Interesting to read what they have changed.
Based on the education divide in 2016, more pollsters are weighting by education and using new ways to reach respondents.
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But one thing came up again and again in our interviews: Pollsters told us they were now weighting their samples by education, because one key takeaway from 2016 was just how important someone’s level of educational attainment was in predicting their vote. “In mid-2016, we changed our weights by education, moving the percentage of high school or less respondents up while dropping the college-plus down,” said Jeff Horwitt, a senior vice president at Hart Research, one of the pollsters for the NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll. It was the middle of the election cycle, but already Horwitt and his team were concerned that they might be underestimating the share of the electorate who didn’t have a four-year college degree, and therefore, missing some of Trump’s support. They were right to be concerned, too. A real problem for the polling industry writ large was the underrepresentation of voters with little or no college education.
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As for other changes since 2016, Marist College Institute for Public Opinion director Lee Miringoff told us they’re paying closer attention to where their respondents live — that is, are they mostly concentrated in a city or outside a metropolitan area? “This has resulted in not only a better balance of geography,” said Miringoff, “but has solved the need to weight by education in most cases.” Given that population density is strongly correlated to how Democratic or Republican an area is — the more people live in a place, the more Democratic it tends to be — this is an important consideration for pollsters as well.
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A number of pollsters have also changed the way they recruit respondents to make sure they are reaching every pocket of the population. Courtney Kennedy, Pew Research Center’s director of survey research, explained that Pew has moved away from conducting polls by live phone calls that use random-digit dialing to reach respondents to an address-based approach in which Pew first gets in touch with respondents by snail mail to recruit them. Horwitt also told us that NBC News/Wall Street Journal no longer uses random-digit dialing; instead, they draw their samples from lists of registered voters, which allows them to “calibrate the mix of respondents between Republicans, independents and Democrats on each survey.”
In fact, many pollsters are using a combination of approaches to reach the widest slice of voters. “We now operate, on any given day, with four different methodologies in use,” explained SurveyUSA CEO Jay Leve, including live telephone calls, automated phone calls, online with pre-recruited respondents and text messaging. The rise of online polling is also part of this story. Spencer Kimball, Emerson College’s polling director, said they have moved away from just using automated phone calls and now use a mixed approach with an online panel component.
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We also asked pollsters what, if anything, they were still worried about in 2020, regarding either their own polls or the polling industry writ large. Interestingly — but perhaps unsurprisingly, given all the work they’ve put into avoiding the errors of 2016 — only one pollster, Gravis Marketing’s president, Doug Kaplan, told us he is worried about missing “the so-called hidden Trump vote.”
In fact, Marist’s Miringoff is worried about the opposite: “I’m concerned that the industry may be fighting the last war.” To Miringoff, the obsession with weighting polls by education has obscured other underlying problems, such as a heavier reliance on listed telephone numbers or online methods rather than the traditional method of polling people: random-digit dialing, which Miringoff and many other established pollsters believe results in more of a truly representative sample.
The most common worries for 2020 polling, though, stemmed from the pandemic. Several pollsters said they worried that pollsters would estimate turnout incorrectly. “This is a perennial difficulty for pollsters and survey researchers, which the pandemic is making even thornier,” CBS News’s Kabir Khanna explained. Quinnipiac University Poll director Doug Schwartz offered an example: “With the coronavirus, there may be voters who tell pollsters that they’re voting but then their area experiences a spike in cases around Election Day, and they no longer feel safe going to the polls.” And Emerson’s Kimball and Morning Consult chief research officer Kyle Dropp both pointed out that voters’ increased access to mail voting makes turnout extra unpredictable. And since polls are only as good as their turnout model, this could lead to some polling misses this fall. (In fact, FiveThirtyEight’s model even built in an extra layer of uncertainty this year because of the possibility that the pandemic will disrupt usual turnout patterns.)
"The most common worries for 2020 polling, though, stemmed from the pandemic. Several pollsters said they worried that pollsters would estimate turnout incorrectly. “This is a perennial difficulty for pollsters and survey researchers"
I have been saying polls are propaganda...fake news, since I joined C-D. My reason is that pollster's can't predict turnout rates.
This is the first time I've seen pollsters admit to the point I've been making all along.
"The most common worries for 2020 polling, though, stemmed from the pandemic. Several pollsters said they worried that pollsters would estimate turnout incorrectly. “This is a perennial difficulty for pollsters and survey researchers"
I have been saying polls are propaganda...fake news, since I joined C-D. My reason is that pollster's can't predict turnout rates.
This is the first time I've seen pollsters admit to the point I've been making all along.
I find it incredibly sad that you just read an article about how much work pollsters are doing to be accurate, then somehow used it to dismiss polls as propaganda. Talk about confirmation bias. I mean if they are just propaganda tools, why do all that work? This is quite the vast conspiracy you’re floating. Do you have any idea how hard it would be to keep something like that secret?
Are polls perfect? Of course not. There are countless people putting in countless hours in the name of trying to be more accurate. They will never be perfect, but calling them out as propagandists is so incredibly cynical.
Let’s keep in mind this bit from the reading:
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If you ask Americans whether they trust the polls, many seem unable to let go of what happened in 2016. Polls taken since then have generally found that a majority of Americans have at least some doubts about what polls say. But as FiveThirtyEight wrote in the run-up to the 2016 election, Donald Trump was always a normal polling error behind Hillary Clinton.
And that’s essentially what happened in 2016: Trump beat his polls by just a few points in just a few states. The presidential polls were, simply, not that off. State-level polling was less accurate, although as editor-in-chief Nate Silver wrote after the election, it was “still within the ‘normal’ range of accuracy.”
OP, I found the information very...informative. I take a lot of interest in how polls are done, especially with the rise of cell phones since 2008 or so, with many making it their only phone, versus the landline phone which remains the choice of seniors.
You have Trump rallies where thousands show up. Then you have Biden giving a speech to 50 people or less. A major disconnect in enthusiasm. Turnout is what wins elections.
So are the polls cooked? Not necessary. However, I do think the questions are designed to tilt in favor of Biden which helps the DNC fund raising.
But watch....come Nov. 2nd we'll see many reputable polling outfits placing battleground states within a margin of error.
This way Nate Silver/538 as well as the polling outfits have covered themselves in the event Trump victory.
"The most common worries for 2020 polling, though, stemmed from the pandemic. Several pollsters said they worried that pollsters would estimate turnout incorrectly. “This is a perennial difficulty for pollsters and survey researchers"
I have been saying polls are propaganda...fake news, since I joined C-D. My reason is that pollster's can't predict turnout rates.
This is the first time I've seen pollsters admit to the point I've been making all along.
Polls are designed to get the result they want and to then influence people, not inform them.
You have Trump rallies where thousands show up. Then you have Biden giving a speech to 50 people or less. A major disconnect in enthusiasm. Turnout is what wins elections.
So are the polls cooked? Not necessary. However, I do think the questions are designed to tilt in favor of Biden which helps the DNC fund raising.
But watch....come Nov. 2nd we'll see many reputable polling outfits placing battleground states within a margin of error.
This way Nate Silver/538 as well as the polling outfits have covered themselves in the event Trump victory.
To believe this, you would need to feel confident in a few things:
-Rally attendance during a pandemic, when one side is actively promoting rallies and the other is saying you should not go to large public events, is a good indication of enthusiasm
-The Gallup poll on enthusiasm to vote, which showed both parties to be about equal this year, is completely wrong
-Enthusiasm for a candidate is more important than enthusiasm against a candidate
You clearly want these all to be true, but I don’t think anyone with a grain of academic integrity could look you squarely in the eyes and say that they are all true with certainty.
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Originally Posted by Vector1
Polls are designed to get the result they want and to then influence people, not inform them.
Again, I don’t know how you read this and come away with that. The errors in the two Obama Presidential election polls were too strong for the Republican candidates. The idea that polling is a left wing conspiracy is simply not supported by evidence.
To believe this, you would need to feel confident in a few things:
-Rally attendance during a pandemic, when one side is actively promoting rallies and the other is saying you should not go to large public events, is a good indication of enthusiasm
-The Gallup poll on enthusiasm to vote, which showed both parties to be about equal this year, is completely wrong
-Enthusiasm for a candidate is more important than enthusiasm against a candidate
You clearly want these all to be true, but I don’t think anyone with a grain of academic integrity could look you squarely in the eyes and say that they are all true with certainty.
Again, I don’t know how you read this and come away with that. The errors in the two Obama Presidential election polls were too strong for the Republican candidates. The idea that polling is a left wing conspiracy is simply not supported by evidence.
Of course nothing is certain esp. in this election. However...
1. I don't believe it's because of health concerns Biden's rallies are almost non-existent. H. Clinton weren't much better.
2. -The Gallup poll on enthusiasm to vote, which showed both parties to be about equal this year, is completely wrong
I didn't see this poll % but did the 56% who believe the country is better off now than in 2016. So call it a wash.
3. Enthusiasm for a candidate is more important than enthusiasm against a candidate
Yes. Similar to what we saw in 2016. I think the Black/Hispanic turnout will be the same 2016 with Trump
picking up a few % points in each group. The suburban women vote for Biden won't be as strong as the MSM suggests. The same with the senior vote.
The Biden/Harris ticket is terrible. Only the MSM has kept it alive. Nothing supports a Biden victory except the polls which I don't think are cooked but are aren't accurate esp in the battleground states: https://www.city-data.com/forum/59432192-post219.html
I suspect Nate Silver/538 knows this election is much close than he's reporting but understands his readers visit for reassurance of a Biden victory.
Of course nothing is certain esp. in this election. However...
1. I don't believe it's because of health concerns Biden's rallies are almost non-existent. H. Clinton weren't much better.
3. -The Gallup poll on enthusiasm to vote, which showed both parties to be about equal this year, is completely wrong
I didn't see this poll % but did the 56% who believe the country is better off now than in 2016. So call it a wash.
2. Enthusiasm for a candidate is more important than enthusiasm against a candidate
Yes. Similar to what we saw in 2016. I think the Black/Hispanic turnout will be the same 2016 with Trump
picking up a few % points in each group. The suburban women vote for Biden won't be as strong as the MSM suggests. The same with the senior vote.
The Biden/Harris ticket is terrible. Only the MSM has kept it alive. Nothing supports a Biden victory except the polls which I don't think are cooked but are aren't accurate esp in the battleground states: https://www.city-data.com/forum/59432192-post219.html
I suspect Nate Silver/538 knows this election is much close than he's reporting but also understands his readers visit for reassurance of a Biden victory. He's caught in a bind.
I think one could argue that the enthusiasm against Hillary was a decent part of what propelled Trump to victory in 2016.
As for Silver, his site is based on a mathematical model that is simply taking inputs and spitting out outputs. He could die tomorrow and the model would continue to run. He’s not editorializing inside the model.
"The most common worries for 2020 polling, though, stemmed from the pandemic. Several pollsters said they worried that pollsters would estimate turnout incorrectly. “This is a perennial difficulty for pollsters and survey researchers"
I have been saying polls are propaganda...fake news, since I joined C-D. My reason is that pollster's can't predict turnout rates.
This is the first time I've seen pollsters admit to the point I've been making all along.
Is anything not a conspiracy with you people?
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