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I highly recommend this article from the American Association for Public Opinion Research on the 2016 polling error to gain more insight into this issue.
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Nov 19, 2020 20:53
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| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 15:39 |
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A lot of the issues with phone polling are just issues with polling. People are idiots. They give responses to questions they know nothing about. They give responses that aren't what they actually believe, but because they think they are the "right" answer, or the answer that they think the survey administrator somehow wants them to give. They change their responses based on small changes in question wording. They are easy to sway with big changes in question wording. I have watched consultants deliberately design polls and surveys poorly so as to produce a result that is preferable for their client, and this is easy to do because people act like idiots. On a relative basis, presidential polling at the national level is fairly reliable, even with the vagaries of phone polling. Aggregate national polling in both 2020 and 2016 estimated the popular vote with a fair degree of accuracy. You're dealing with a huge sample size and asking them a simple question about two people who show up on TV all the time, one versus the other. State-level polling is a lot more difficult, and unfortunately for the presidential election, that's all that matters due to the electoral college, and in the swing states you are often dealing with the type of people who don't pick up the phone, and in both 2016 and 2020 this helped to skew state-level polls. It is hard, but not impossible, to overcome this effect through weighting. That being said, there is a general consensus among political scientists that there is no "shy Trump voter" effect. Attitudinal polling (polling about issues) is awful, and to a certain extent you can just treat it as bullshit for the reasons stated above. Huge long-term academic studies like the ANES and CCES are going to be more reliable, but still. The absolute worst is the "presidential approval" question. Gallup's, for instance, is "Do you approve or disapprove of the way ... is handling his job as president?" This sounds straightforward but is actually super vague! People interpret it in all kinds of ways. I don't think the practice of polling is itself doomed, but as I have warned in D&D again and again since 2016, estimating the Electoral College outcome based on state-level polling is as of now a fool's errand.
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Nov 19, 2020 22:34
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