ANALYSIS โ โRed ripple.' For at least the last several elections, pollsters have consistently oversampled Democrats and undercounted Republicans, wrongly skewing the polls in the Dems' favor.
This is something I have written about before, and the pollster errors include the โshy Trump supporter' effect where conservatives simply shun pollsters or avoid giving their true views out of fear of retribution or being โcanceled.'
Frank Luntz, a political strategist said to The Hill: โWe knew from 2016, 2018 and even 2020 thatย Trumpย voters tended not to respond to pollsters because they thought that the results would be used against them.โย
This time around the pollsters seem to have screwed up in the opposite direction, overcompensating by overweighting Republican supporters and predicting a โRed Wave' in the midterm elections that never materialized.
I must admit, I too assumed that the pollsters would continue to err in favor of Dems and hence believed the polling was still undercounting Republicans.
But as they say โ you should never assume because then you make an โass out of u and me.'
And as Luntz added,ย โpast errors caused pollsters to over-index Republicans.โ
Theย Daily Caller News Foundationย just did a solid analysis on this latest pollster screw-up.
As the Daily Callerย reports:
Weighting Republican respondents more heavily than Democratic respondents in polls led to an overestimation of GOP support, which created the mirage of a โred waveโ this midterm season, polling experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
In the House of Representatives, FiveThirtyEight, based on an aggregation of major polls, predicted aย 228-seat GOP majorityย as the most likely outcome, while RealClearPolitics had projectedย at least 227 seats, with additions from 34 tossup races. In the Senate, FiveThirtyEightย forecast 51 seatsย for the GOP, with 52 and 53 seats being as likely, while RealClearPoliticsย forecast 53 seatsย for Senate Republicans.
The results were significantly different from these projections. Though some races are yet to be called, Democrats retained control of the Senate, having won 50 seats as of writing, while Republicans, though projected to win the House, will have a narrow majority close to the 218 seats necessary for one.
The Daily Caller continues:
In the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections, former Presidentย Donald Trump significantly overperformed pollingย in several states that pegged him to lose, with his unexpected 2016 wins in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio and North Carolina giving him an Electoral College majority to win. Though Trump lost the 2020 election, he still won states like Florida and Ohio and came close to winning races in Georgia, Arizona and Pennsylvania, which polling firms had estimated would be easily won by Joe Biden.
In all, in 2020, polls underestimated the presidential popular vote, swing-state vote, Democratic House majority and the Democratic Senate majority. The American Academy of Public Opinion Research (AAPOR)ย called itย the โworst performance for polls since 1980.โ
And this appears to have caused the severe pollster overcompensation we saw leading up to the midterms.
In artillery, you often fire beyond (long) and before (short of) a target to close in on it and โfire for effect.' This is called โbracketing.'
The idea is that on the third salvo you should hit the target close to spot on.
Let's see if these varied pollster results that undercounted GOP voters and then overcounted them were the โbracketing' needed prior to their getting the 2024 polls right.
I'm not optimistic. ALD
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions ofย American Liberty News.
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2 Comments
I believe the polls didn’t err this time. I believe the polls correctly sampled what voters were thinking, but they instead voted emotionally in large part for abortion convenience and Democrat handouts instead of following the thought process that they reported to the pollsters. I believe Democrats played successfully on emotional appeals to young and unmarried women. I believe there will result huge voter remorse, but these voters can’t undue what they have done.
I believe the pollsters INTENTIONALLY over stated Republican votes to drive Democrats to the vote. There are many ways to alter the results of an election, and changing votes is the least of them.