The Daily Beast: Pollsters Have ‘No (Blanking) Idea What’s Going to Happen’ This Election

Pollsters Have ‘No (Blanking) Idea What’s Going to Happen’ This Election (The Daily Beastlink): If the pollsters and handicappers end up being spectacularly wrong on Election Night, there’s one group that won’t be too surprised: the pollsters and handicappers themselves.

The 2022 midterms could go exactly as modeled—a 20-some-odd-seat pickup for Republicans in the House and maybe a 51-49 GOP Senate—but the people who watch these races the closest are also warning they might be wrong in decisive ways. In either direction.

No one really knows because, like every election, pollsters are extrapolating their best guess based on a set of assumptions. But unlike previous elections, the assumptions are getting bigger.

According to Dave Wasserman, the U.S. House editor at the Cook Political Report, the big problem is that “response rates suck.”

“We’re down to 1 percent of people on a good day who are willing to talk to a pollster for free,” he told The Daily Beast.

Wasserman, perhaps the top handicapper of U.S. House races, said everyone was trying different ways to solve for “partisan non-response bias”—essentially a measure of how a poll isn’t representative of the actual population—but that means every pollster was making “a different assumption about who’s going to show up on Nov. 8 that may or may not be accurate.”

“We are, in many respects, stumbling through the dark with headlamps and flashlights,” Wasserman said. “And we have a vague understanding of where these races stand, but there are bound to be surprises.”

Nate Silver, the founder and editor in chief of the data-driven news site FiveThirtyEight, expressed many of the same concerns as Wasserman.

“The quick version is that polling is getting harder because fewer and fewer people answer phone calls from unknown numbers, and among those who do, it’s still a fairly big ask to have them complete a long survey at a time of declining civic trust,” Silver told The Daily Beast. “So those people who do respond are unusual in some respects, in ways that you may or may not be able to correct for—and there may also be the risk of overcorrecting.”

Silver noted that online polls could avoid some of these problems, but they introduce others, “namely that it’s hard to get a truly random sample online the way you can with phone numbers.”

“I don’t think this means that polling is irrevocably broken,” he continued. “But we shouldn’t expect pinpoint accuracy and there is not necessarily a correct, ‘gold standard’ way to conduct polling anymore.”

Mod: More on increased polling futility at the link.

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