Interesting fall on the sword by Rasmussen Polling

Evaluating pre-election polling following 2020

At the 2021 virtual conference of the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR), a task force presented the findings from their official assessment of 2020 pre-election polling. [1]The findings confirmed what general suspicions and early analysis had shown: That 2020 polls collectively overstated support for Democrats in every contest and generated the highest polling errors in “at least 20 years.”[2] However, the task force was unable to determine what caused the error with the available data, only that it was “consistent with systemic non-response.”

The conclusions, or lack thereof, from the task force are disappointing on one dimension. That an all-star group of hard-working researchers in the industry did not provide concrete answers to what went wrong is somewhat disheartening. By the same token, however, that could be good for the industry overall in two ways: It could help reset expectations for pre-election polls because there is no single identifiable “fix” to be applied, and it is likely to spur innovation among diverse methodologies to identify and address underlying problems.

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