Young and other researchers said they tweaked their methodology in several other ways to ensure they included an accurate mix of Democratic and Republican voters.
Elections in the shadow of the ballot boxes
Pollsters increasingly draw samples from voter registration databases rather than relying on random lists of phone numbers.
— Register-based sampling systems provide more detailed information about where respondents live. The practice makes it easier to weight the data to ensure that rural areas and other areas with right-wing views that favor Trump are not underrepresented in the results, said Charles Franklin, director of the Marquette Law School Poll in Wisconsin.
Another important change in polling is that in the last two election cycles, pollsters have typically weighted their results by education.to ensure they accurately capture non-college-educated voters who lean toward Trump.
Trump led in polls for most of the year before Biden dropped out of the race in July and was replaced by Vice President Kamala Harris. Trump is currently tied or ahead of Harris in many national and state polls.
Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said in response to a request for comment that the former president is “dominating” in the polls two months before the election.
— Polls show that President Trump is dominating both nationally and in swing states because voters want a return to pro-American policies that actually work, Cheung said in an interview with Newsweek.
Newsweek also asked Harris’ strategists for comment for this article.
Much of the debate over Trump’s impact on the polls dates back to the 2016 election. At that time, opinion polls routinely undercounted voters without college degrees, which led to thisthat most polls showed Trump losing several percentage points to his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton.
The biggest underestimates of Trump’s performance in 2016 were in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan. Clinton held a comfortable lead until Election Day.
According to the Marquette Law School poll, Trump led in just one of 133 polls conducted in the three so-called Blue Wall states from early September through the final day of the race.
On election night, Trump won all three states and surprise victories helped seal his victory in the Electoral College. He won the most votes among people without a college degree, according to national exit polls.
Trump has shy voters
In 2020, the political polling industry’s focus on education made most polls more accurate than four years earlier.
But Trump still received more votes in 2020 than polls suggested, further fueling the popular theory that there are millions of so-called shy Trump voters who won’t admit to polls that they plan to vote for him.
This theory is largely dismissed by pollsters who believe it is difficult to determine from polls whether respondents who say they do not support Trump are not telling the truth or are simply undecided about who they intend to vote for.
– “It’s a marginal issue,” Young said. He added that the bigger problem is finding a way to capture the humor likely Trump supporters who don’t normally vote.
As Franklin said, the challenge in 2024 is not so much getting honest answers from potential Trump voters as getting any answers at all.
“Most Trump supporters are very suspicious of the media and other institutions, including pollsters,” Franklin said. “It’s not that they do an election interview and say they’re not voting for Trump, but they do vote. The problem is that they don’t agree to an interview from the beginning.”
Election day is the day of truth
The pollsters said the issue appeared to be directly related to Trump, who in 2016 and 2020 turned out voters who had not voted regularly in previous presidential elections. The polls were more accurate in the 2018 and 2022 midterm elections, when Trump was not on the voter rolls.
It remains to be seen whether investigators will be able to do that when voting begins in the 2024 presidential election.
“Researchers have certainly made changes to the way they conduct research to try to limit this problem,” Franklin said. “We won’t know if they’ll work until early November.”
Sam Chen, a Pennsylvania Republican strategist whose company conducting some of the polls, said Republicans shouldn’t disregard the polls this time nor assume that the timid Trump voter effect will influence the election.
— One of the mistakes the Republican Party made in 2020 was assuming that the silent majority (Trump) would remain silent. In fact, they have reached out, Chen said. — I don’t think Trump’s support is counted as inaccurately as it used to be.
Text published in the American magazine “Newsweek”. Title, lead and subtitles by the editors of “Newsweek Polska”.
