Is polling simply too hard to do with any reasonable degree of accuracy now? It was already challenging to properly weight your sample onto some speculative mix of true voters but you blend that in with the changes in voting intentions from historic tendencies and the difficulty to get anything close to a representative sample at the outset and it’s seeming a bridge too far.
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I was following Polymarket and since it’s based on people betting real money, it seems to be more accurate than polling. They were a lot more accurate before the election and a lot quicker to report states winning than the news outlets. I believe they went 50 for 50 in the presidential election
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I think a bigger problem with “modern political polling” is how the pollsters (and users of the poll) choose to interpret the poll questions (and the results) in relation to how a respondent is interpreting the question.
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Polling is in the same space as accurate news reporting. It is expensive to do it objectively well. The better, more accurate your product the harder you will have to monetize and maintain control of your product. The result is polling and news reporting funded by a deep pocket with an agenda.
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In addition to other considerations, part of the problem also seems to be the public’s failure to consider/understand the error bars and potential implications of correlation of errors.
That’s probably just a small (but not insignificant) piece of the post-mortem puzzle, however.
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@meep had a bit on her substack article (be sure to subscribe!) Polymarket Prediction Post-mortem - by Mary Pat Campbell
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Isn’t it a bit like Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, or any time someone tries to forecast the Economy?
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Yeah I’m going to post on that guy later. I’m waiting for the trifecta stuff to be certain.
All my posts are free.
You only have to pay if you want to comment on the substack. You know where to find me if you want to talk at me.
I may or may not have something to say about polling, I dunno. I more have to say something about the emotional responses people were having Tuesday night – who were angry about the one Iowa poll that was grossly wrong.
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It is unfortunate that some news disseminators believe that polls are news. I mean, the poll companies think they are news, that is also an issue.
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My take is that they were always inaccurate and Nate Silver got lucky when he predicted an Obama win.
I haven’t looked much at the Iowa deal but could the poll have been within the margin of error but the poll lit a fire under the R’s to make sure they got out and voted thereby increasing the swing?
Why would you expect (public) political polls to be accurate? What is the incentive for accuracy?
The general public has no practical use for election polls. The election itself will happen either way, and you will know the only result that matters then. Pre-election polls only serve to manipulate voter turnout/contributions or to drive media “engagement” – and neither of those require accuracy.
There certainly can be a desire for accuracy when you are conducting a poll to guide strategic decision-making. But there’s no reason to make those results public, and often plenty of reason to keep them private.
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On /r/dataisbeautiful, a redditor has shared this visualization of predicted Harris vote shares from recent polls (based on 538’s database) to actual outcomes:
Their argument is that the big miss on the polls was that the Trump outcomes were approximately equal to the polls’ (Trump + undecided + other) results.
Everybody wants to vote for a winner. How will they know who that will be without a poll?
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I agree with your post, BTW
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Nate Silver would agree with you, basically.
Should add he technically predicted every single state in this election as well.
Lucky guy.
I watched Poly and the NYT “needle” page. The needle was slow to move, but they also estimated the state margins as the count was tabulated, and I think the margins were reasonably in sync with poly.
So… no.
It had Harris up by 3 in Iowa.
This was the result for Iowa:
https://www.google.com/search?q=result+for+iowa&rlz=1C1CHBF_enUS840US841&oq=result+for+iowa&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyBggAEEUYOdIBCDQ5MDJqMGo3qAIAsAIA&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
Trump was +13.2
A swing of 16 is definitely not within the confidence interval.