2020 Election Was Worst Polling Miss In 40 Years

[applegrove]

2020 Election Was Worst Polling Miss In 40 Years

May 13, 2021 at 1:00 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard 85 Comments

https://politicalwire.com/2021/05/13/2020-election-was-worst-polling-miss-in-40-years/

"SNIP.....

Wall Street Journal: “Public opinion surveys ahead of the 2020 presidential election were the most inaccurate in 40 years, according to an expert panel convened by the main trade group for pollsters, which said its work hadn’t yet pointed to a way to correct the error.”

“In the aggregate, the panel said, polls overstated support for Democratic nominee Joe Biden by 3.9 percentage points in the national popular vote in the final two weeks of the campaign.”

“It was the most substantial error in polling since 1980, when surveys found it hard to measure the size of Ronald Reagan’s impending landslide and overstated support for President Jimmy Carter by 6 percentage points.”

......SNIP"

[applegrove]

1. Giving Biden a comfortable win would suppress Democratic voters.

It also changes how the campaign is run.

[DemocratSinceBirth]

2. I don't know if it's permanent.

Trump broke polling because there is not an insignificant number of people who are ashamed to tell pollsters they support him.

[Ace Rothstein]

6. They actually just don't respond to pollsters at all.

I don't know how you account for that.

[Hoyt]

7. That is exactly the reason. A significant percentage of trumpsters decided to keep it to themselves.

[Hugh_Lebowski]

3. Simple explanation is that our voter enthusiasm was lower ...

Trump supporters were rabid.

Biden supporters were supporters, but a lot of them weren't nearly as excited to vote for him as most Trump voters were to vote for him.

All these polls have to estimate 'likely voters', they never KNOW anyone is going to vote.

Ergo, a slightly higher % of Trump voters that appeared 'likely' to vote, by whatever measure was used ... actually cast a vote.

There's also probably some other problems with randomness of samples, which is difficult to achieve in practice but essential for reliable results, but this is always a problem, so ...

But enthusiasm is probably at the root of it.

[AZSkiffyGeek]

8. I'm also not sure the never Trumpers translated into D votes

Several prominent never Trumpers admitted to writing in other Republicans like Condi Rice.

The Biden campaign tried to warn people that it was likely much closer - their internal polling was apparently spot-on. But there were people here dismissing the warnings as fearmongering.

[Ace Rothstein]

4. That one WI poll that showed Biden +17 or somewhere around that was so wildly off.

It is gonna be a while before I can trust polls again.

[Elessar Zappa]

10. They did end up

being pretty accurate in the Georgia senate race. I think the polling just didn’t accurately measure Trump’s support because a segment were embarrassed to admit supporting him.

[FakeNoose]

16. They're forgetting that ChumpHumpers' favorite game

... is LYING to the pollsters. They do it for fun, and then they brag about it.

How can anyone believe any polls? And yet they never stop calling ... 20 times a day sometimes.

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

5. Really?

I thought 2016 was worse. Almost no one predicted Trump to win.

[msfiddlestix]

9. Right? Article feels like Revisionism to me..

And another thing, in both 2016 and in 2020, we could (if we had a robustly honest/accurate and independent accounting) actually have a finding of significant election fraud. I'm not saying "voter" fraud, I'm saying Election Fraud. big huge difference. Kentucky comes to mind, as well as Wisconsin.

So if we have weird polling from biased sources, put together with election fraud, we never have an accurate reading or result.

What we have is disinformation, creating a narrative based on misinformation. resulting in historical revisionism, which is repeated and repeated and repeated again.

This just has to stop, but I don't have hope we're going to see that anytime soon.

Even though election fraud has been going on since at least the times of Tammany Hall, there have been reforms and corrections in terms of oversight and accountability and to some degree of credibility. When 2000 happened, that opened my eyes, and so did 2004 elections.

It's just over whelming all that we need to accomplish to repair/restore our democracy.

[sarisataka]

11. I seem to recall

That the complaints were the polls weren't showing Joe far enough ahead. It was said the media wanted a horse race and so were falsifying the numbers to hide the coming landslide; there was no possible way Trump would come close to his previous vote total.

Anyone who cautioned against excessive optimism was a "Debbie downer" or a troll trying to suppress the vote.

[stillcool]

12. perception is everything

create perception, and you create reality.

[WarGamer]

13. polling is crap.

[ecstatic]

14. or... maybe the QOP cheated?

Why is that possibility never considered?

[RegularJam]

15. It wasn't an error in the polling.

We are giving up a lot in order to claim this was a great election. We are giving up a lot.