Polling missed mark in many battleground states
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Polling in the 2020 presidential race was under a lot of scrutiny after so many polls missed the mark in the 2016 race when Donald Trump won in a surprise over Hillary Clinton. It turns out 2020 wasn’t much better for most pollsters.
According to FiveThirtyEight.com, polls in battleground states overestimated the Democratic advantage by an average of about four percent. One poll in Wisconsin by ABC News and the Washington Post had Biden up 17 points on Trump. The final result pending a recount has Biden up by one point.
The KSTP/SurveyUSA polls in Minnesota were a notable exception. In the presidential race, our polling consistently had Biden in the lead. Our final poll less than a week before the election showed him leading 47 to 42 percent, a five-point margin. The actual result was Biden by eight points, 53 to 45 percent. That was well within the poll’s margin of error.
We had a similar result in our KSTP/SurveyUSA Senate poll. Our final pre-election poll had Democrat Tina Smith leading by three points, 45 to 42 percent. Her actual margin of victory was 49 to 44 percent, a five-point margin.
But those polls were an exception.
Early voters line up to cast their ballots at the South Regional Library polling location in Durham, N.C., Thursday, Oct. 15, 2020.[AP Photo/Gerry Broome]
"I think the challenge of the 21st century is to get anybody to pick up their phone," says former Minnesota DFL Party Chair Mike Erlandson. "People by and large aren’t answering them. Their phone numbers are not listed. People are not honest."
Former GOP Minnesota House Speaker Kurt Zellers says it’s not just technology, but political polarization making polling more difficult.
"I saw a pollster on TV that said the American voter right now will not tell a pollster three things," he says. "I inherited a lot of money. I have a lot of guns in my house….or I voted for Donald Trump. And those three things automatically exclude an honest or any answer to a pollster. So they’re going to have to get smarter at it because nobody believes they know what they’re doing at all right now."
You can see more analysis of political polling Sunday morning at 10 on "At Issue with Tom Hauser."