Elections Why Were The Polls Wrong Yet Again?

How were the polls wrong? They seemed spot on. They favored trump by a little in all the swing states the last two weeks before the election after momentum shifted
 
Vast majority of modeling based on agg polling, trend lines and other variables were correct. People still conflating probabilities with predictions. RCP was basically perfect with their model


Individual polling was really accurate as well.

Popular Vote probabilities as a whole were pretty off aside from RCP but voter apathy is hard to predict. Carrying over 2020 metrics and putting them as transferable to Hamala was a mistake.
 
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The polls only take into account answers from people who are willing to speak to pollsters.

Trump supporters like to imagine their real-estate billionare is somehow an anti-establishment candidate, so they're probably less willing to speak to pollsters since they see the media as being part of the establishment.
 
WhiteMousse said:
It's probably wishful thinking on my part but I'd like to open an honest discussion about the nature of polls, whether or not they have provided utility in prior elections and why they've seemed to be off for almost a decade.

I understand that we're ultimately looking at a situation in which one of only two predictions are going to be correct. But the Iowa Selzer poll, amidst almost every other that came out in the weeks and months leading up to the election, demonstrate that something is seriously wrong with either the way in which the data is being gathered, or the reception to the prompts for that data.

I myself will not get rustled if you just come in to tell me how stupid I am. Maybe I am stupid. That's the reason I try to learn from different people, and it's the reason I'm making this thread. I'd ask that you be respectful to each other however. If possible, let's not let this devolve into a shit-slinging contest.

The fact is that presidential polls have, up until last month, never underrepresented a party three times in a row. Something is seriously off. I realize that there's probably no one single element, but a number of contributing factors. I'd like to examine them.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say it's pretty silly to simplify it down to "they're liberals so they favor liberals". I don't think that every single major news network aside from Fox would just lie about data. Harris' own campaign does admit in this interview that their internal polling never had a great outlook, but that was not common knowledge until after the election:


So what's going on? Everyone who has ever said "I don't care about polls" has, at one point or another, utilized polls whenever it suits them. But unless people figure out what went wrong and how it went so wrong, they'll become less and less useful.

Conversely the betting odds had it precisely correct for the most part. Harris had a short lived surge but electionbettingodds.com had it 312 for Trump almost the entire time. Some of the prominent people who are by now in hiding for a bit insisted this was due to a "mystery bettor" who placed two large bids for Trump, essentially thumbing the scales. But I think it was about a million maybe, which represented less than 1% of the pool.

Anyway I'm curious to get feedback on what could have caused the polls to get it wrong three times in a row. Some have said that Trump supporters are less likely to engage with analysts, or less likely to admit they voted for Trump. I can see this, but I have a hard time believing this is the sole element.
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Something, something, something...Racism.

Something, something, something...Misogyny.
 
JudoThrowFiasco said:
Vast majority of modeling based on agg polling, trend lines and other variables were correct. People still conflating probabilities with predictions. RCP was basically perfect with their model


Individual polling was really accurate as well.

Popular Vote probabilities as a whole were pretty off aside from RCP but voter apathy is hard to predict. Carrying over 2020 metrics and putting them as transferable to Hamala was a mistake.
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You're correct on pretty much all of that. The voter apathy narrative is a little overblown, though. The voter difference between 2020 and 2024 was around 3.5 million, or just over 2%, and the 2024 election was a historical one in terms of engagement and raw vote totals.

Also, it's probably worth noting that had Kamala received the exact same numbers as Biden's record breaking 2020 totals in all states, and Trump retained his 2024 totals, Trump still wins all the swing states and 312 electoral college votes (even though he'd lose the popular vote).
 
jeremyemilio said:
You're correct on pretty much all of that. The voter apathy narrative is a little overblown, though. The voter difference between 2020 and 2024 was around 3.5 million, or just over 2%, and the 2024 election was a historical one in terms of engagement and raw vote totals.

Also, it's probably worth noting that had Kamala received the exact same numbers as Biden's record breaking 2020 totals in all states, and Trump retained his 2024 totals, Trump still wins all the swing states and 312 electoral college votes (even though he'd lose the popular vote).
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I haven't seen the EC margin separation that asserts that claim. I know urban center turnout was lower than 2020 which really impacted kamala in swing states.

You got the swing state comparisons handy?
 
When Trump won in 2016 it was a surprise going by the polls, also Boris Johnson (UK) and Scott Morrison (Australia) all won their elections around the same time and neither were favoured in the polls. All 3 Conservative, there's something in that.
 
Seems like the polls dont anticipate preference falsification, though perhaps the results are still within the margin of error.
 
The polls were pretty much bang on when viewed as an aggregate. There are always outliers that skew for one side, like that shameless hack Ann Selzer.
 
It's because the people who usually participate in the polls have time to do so because they don't have jobs so of course they vote Democrat. The red majority is too busy working to do polls.
 
Err said:
The polls were pretty much bang on when viewed as an aggregate. There are always outliers that skew for one side, like that shameless hack Ann Selzer.
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LOL, wtf are you talking about?

They were worse than ever before. The final popular vote predictions from the major pollsters projected Harris to win by anywhere from 0.6-1.8 pts. She got stomped by 1.6 points. Them being off by 2.2-3.4 points might be within the realm of predictable error, statistically, but it's awful. It's just a terrible prediction. That's nearly triple the error from Clinton vs. Trump in 2016.

We're not talking about a County or a State. This is the whole enchilada. There are thousands of polls contributing to it, and a greater pool of votes to stabilize the estimate.

It's a question worth asking because misses favoring Democrats are becoming so consistent it raises an eyebrow.
 
Out of dozens and dozens of late race polls, a couple were moderately off.

On the whole they were quite accurate.

The latest polls before the election showed an extremely close, within the margin of error race, and it was an extremely close, within the margin of error vote.

Nate Silver had his final projection at:
Kamala Harris won in 40,012 (50.015%) cases. She did not win in 39,988 simulations (49.985%).
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You can't get any more uncertain than that.

Certainly the specific ones that were off need to investigate and see if there's something that can be done better in the future.

But the narrative some people want to sell of "don't believe the polls" is pure BS.
 
Not sure where these polls are happening... like Trump, "No one has called me".

I assume they're "polling", where they can get the largest amount of answers in a short time. College universities, inner cities, on social media sites, etc. All places which are biased and probably have higher odds of favoring libs. I would also assume that a lot of folks are scared to say who they're really liking as a candidate as the dems each other, rabidly and rapidly.
 
Because a majority of people skip polls or refuse to answer them.

Have you ever seen those polls on YouTube?
Do you always choose an answer or do you skip it?

What about when you call your utility company and they ask you to complete a short survey when the call is over?
Do you hang up the phone or do you wait and complete the survey?
Most people usually hang up.
 
Because polls are mostly bullshit and constantly used as a political tool to argue one stance or another.

They can easily be manipulated.
 
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