BOSTON — Did pollsters get this election right or wrong? It’s a question a lot of people are asking today.
It was widely believed pollsters flubbed the state reporting of the 2016 presidential election when President Trump ran against Hilary Clinton.
>> Election 2020 Live Updates <<
Professor Joshua Dyck, Director UMass-Lowell’s Center For Public Opinion, believes the industry has improved in the past four years, including in the important battleground states.
“I think that’s a really hard question that pollsters will have to look at introspectively. If the story in 3 or 4 days is that there was a razor-thin margin in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, again, and the polls once again underestimated Donald Trump support there is going to be serious questions about why, because adjustments were made after 2016,” he said.
Dyck said Republicans are being undercounted in some states and believe it’s due to President Trump being quite good at mobilizing support late.
“He did these barnstorming rallies. At the end, he hit 5 states in one day of the campaign and we’re looking at a historic turnout. I think some of what happened in these polls is likely the voter models were capturing Democratic enthusiasm, but not Republican enthusiasm,” Dyck said.
Dyck also said polling is not going anywhere, but it will likely look a bit different in 2024.
“People are still going to release polls and people are still going to consume polls. So a vibrant polling environment is best when those polls are conducted by people who have no stake in the outcome, whose goal is to provide public information and to get the answer right and not to construct the narrative and to push it into one direction or the other,” he said.
According to Dyck, we won’t know how big of an error there is until a final count of the votes in the next few days.
He said if it’s outside the margin of error then there may be a more systemic problem in the polling industry that points to a bigger problem.
Voter Resources: