The polling industry blows it again

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The pollsters got Donald Trump wrong — again. Now they're wondering whether their methods are fundamentally broken — or if they're just unable to measure Trump’s support, specifically.

When all the votes are tallied, Joe Biden isn’t going to win the popular vote by double digits. Trump lost Wisconsin by a point, not the 17-point defeat one survey suggested. And Trump obviously didn't go down in an election night landslide, as some polls suggested would happen.

It’s impossible to quantify the magnitude by which the polls missed the mark until the vote count is complete — but Trump clearly overperformed in many of the battlegrounds, winning some toss-ups comfortably and running close in states where Biden had big polling leads. But there’s no doubt that public polls of the presidential race missed the mark, especially in key states. One popular explanation is that "shy Trump voters" hid their true intentions in interviews with pollsters.

But even weighting their surveys to increase the number of white voters without a college degree wasn't enough this year. Still, the more common miss for public pollsters was in the other direction. The ABC News/Washington Post poll in October showing Biden ahead by 17 in Wisconsin got a lot of ink as an outlier, but the problems were more pervasive than that. The final New York Times/Siena College polls in Wisconsin and Florida had Biden up 11 points and 6 points, respectively.

At the House level, many of Democrats’ top challengers fizzled despite rosy polling, and some incumbents thought to be secure went down, such as freshman Rep. Donna Shalala .

 

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How embarrassing. I mean for the Brunch Liberals who sent in that much money to Bush-Cheney Republicans. I mean, redistricting anyone? Donald gets 4M more votes than Hillary did? Yikes.

🤣🤣 Misleading headline. Just over performance in a loss is for the stat nerds only. History records the winners and losers only.

Dont get high and mighty . You 'journalists' blew it too

LINK 2 NOITE DE VIGÍLIA GLOBAL - 06/11/2020 - O TEMPO ACABOU O MESSIAS ESTÁ VINDO! GlobalHolyVigil

They were closer on Trump then on the Senate, so it doesn’t seem to be Trump specific.

Why don’t you ask pollsters what they think? I bet I can guess their flawed answer😂 RachelBitecofer

Let’s wait to judge polling until everything is counted & we know all xfactors - ballots were never counted USPS or other reasons. Also how many people who intended to vote but did not because of covid spikes. There is a lot we don’t know yet about pandemic election.

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