Immediately after the Election Day, Charles Franklin, Director of Law College in Market in Wisconsin, received many requests for media interviews.
“I got at least three interviews, if not four, interviews with a reporter:” The polls were wrong again. Dr. Franklin said: What is their misfortune this year?
But in general, opinion polls were a good year. In five of the seven swinging countries, and at the national level, the final average opinion polls gathered by the New York Times missed the actual presidential margin of elections with less than three percentage points. All the results of the oscillation were within the exemplary error margin.
However, Donald Trump’s sweeping of the swinging states and winning the decisive electoral college, along with his popular victory in voting, left many voters with a feeling that opinion polls were absent from the mark by not categorically reference to Trump’s victory.
The Times spoke with six major opinion polls, who appreciated the performance of the industry this year between C+ and A- (their analyzes were almost identical; some of them were just students in the toughest grade).
They are largely optimistic about the future. They said that every electoral cycle provides a new opportunity to learn and amend the polling methods. Political polls have always attracted anger: in any specific poll, someone It must be unhappy to see the results. Here are some of the largest fast food from 2024 and where they see the industry is heading.
The polls are well achieved in a difficult year.
Anyone in the polling world was heading to election day that Trump’s victory was completely reasonable. Opinion polls showed, on average, a very narrow race between Mr. Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris. Looking at the margin of error, this means any of the candidates can prepare for victory, and even sweeping swinging cases.
Since the election results were very close (Mrs. Harris was among 2.2 percentage points for Mr. Trump in four of the seven swinging countries), it was difficult or impossible for those who explain opinion polls “call” the winner.
Dr. Franklin said: “Opinion polls are a useful indication of the place where the elections are heading,” said Dr. Franklin. “But it is not an infallible crystal.”
This poll can make close elections – as the United States was conducted in the last four presidential races, with popular votes margins within five points – unsatisfactory. The surveys that missed a wider margin, but showed that Mr. Trump at the forefront may be explained as more accurate than those that were missing a smaller margin, but Mr. Trump and Mrs. Harris, or Mrs. Harris showed a little bit.
“If we have a 50-49 race, and the result is 50-49 in both cases, we say,” I got it, “even if we are on the wrong side,” said Douglas Rivers, chief scientist at Yougov. “If people expect that opinion polls will be somewhat accurate, then they deceive themselves.” He said that polls could be accurate at about three percentage points. Anything more accurate than this is outside the scope of current voting capabilities.
But opinion polls in close elections still provide an insightful look. They can help explain the list of elections early (in the case of this year, it was a close race); They can pick up important transformations in the voter behavior; They can give a greater look at the results after the truth. This session, for example, the voters constantly said that the economy was the most important issue, and they constantly said that they trusted Mr. Trump more – a simple discovery that helps clarify the reason for his victory.
“I think our biggest problems as an industry are more related to how society realizes in an era where there is a great doubt about what he really does and the voting role in the elections,” said Li Miringov, Director of the Marist Institute. For public opinion.
But opinion polls reduced Trump again.
As soon as the race was, Mr. Trump won. Through blue states, red states and swinging states, opinion polls Systemically reduced the support of Mr. Trump. Opinion polls Always outside a little In one direction or another, but they are now missing in the same direction, three consecutive sessions, which are an indication that they are struggling to seize the voters of Mr. Trump in particular.
On average, opinion polls have reduced Mr. Trump’s support by two percentage points, a smaller error from 2020 and 2016. Opinion polls have attributed this slight improvement to some of the changes made after these past mistakes, including weighting (setting responses) Based on the previous education and vote, they said they were not enough.
It was difficult to measure the support of Mr. Trump, partly because it works well among the least involved voters who do not participate in opinion polls. “We have very final evidence now that we have an unforgettable non -response problem,” said Keleford Young, head of public affairs at Epsus. “We have these individuals who do not usually participate in anything, and in the past years, past decades, it was not important if we could not explore them because they will not appear anyway,” he said. (Give the C+.)
What is unclear is whether this non -response issue extends to races that Mr. Trump is not on the ticket. In the mid -term races of 2022, for example, opinion polls were conducted Attach her courses in decades. To move forward, transformations in the methodology may be sufficient to capture Republican voters in the post -experience.
“It is clear that we are still facing challenges.” “The issues that we see, are they because of Trump, or are it bigger? Have we entered a kind of new polling age?”
Opinion polls will continue to develop, and this is good.
The leading opinion polls in the country all used very similar techniques, and randomly called the phone numbers to find the respondents. These days, with the disappearance of the ground lines and a fewer number of Americans ready to answer calls from unknown numbers, opinion polls began to diversify their methods.
Those who still drag phone calls mostly call mobile phones, many of which include online panels. Some still use direct interviews, others use Robocalls to make opinion polls, and many opinion polls include a mixture of all these technologies. There was even Some experiences this year using artificial intelligence To design the scanning questions and conduct interviews.
“I don’t think it is bad that we have different methodologies – it is a more realistic and reliable total number.” “What is happening is that you have different researchers coming in the same search problem in different ways.”
In the end, the full image that was more accurate approaches this time will not be shown so that researchers can access the updated voters ‘files (usually in January) and compare the active voters’ behavior with pre -election polls.
With the development of the industry, Dr. Rivers, North Star will continue to be one of the best opinion polls, to obtain their polling results as soon as possible from the actual result. Although voters may not always trust opinion polls – they often hate what they show – polls say they focus on this goal, and not to make people happy.
“We are immune to it now,” said Dr. Paleologos. “Anyone starts to work really needs thick skin.”