Major Democratic Party pollsters on Tuesday acknowledged that they were ‘falling short’ of their own expectations in their polls on the 2020 election, saying ‘big mistakes’ led them to believe Democrats would have a better election day than what ultimately would become reality. .
In a memo, five of the largest Democratic companies – ALG Research, Garin-Hart-Yang Research Group, GBAO Strategies, Global Strategy Group, and Normington Petts – pointed to a litany of potential problems in their polls from not accurately predicting who will turn out actually misinterpret the political views of certain groups of voters in elections
But in the end, the pollsters said, their 2020 analysis didn’t provide clear answers.
“There were several factors that may have contributed to the polling errors in 2020, and there is no one-size-fits-all answer – making solving the problem particularly frustrating,” the pollsters wrote in the memo.
The memo, first reported by Politico on Tuesday, highlights the challenges for Democrats in diagnosing what went wrong in November.
Democrats won the White House, retained control of the House, and won the majority in the Senate two months later. But the results were still a long way from the kind of electoral blowout they had hoped for – and those polls led many to believe they would see it.
Data collected in the weeks and months before election day was shown President Biden
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But Biden’s margin of victory was much smaller than what many Democrats had expected. The memo of the five pollsters noted that “due to the peculiarities of the electoral college, the difference between a new administration and four more years of Donald Trump was only 43,000 votes in Wisconsin, Georgia and Arizona.”
House Democrats, meanwhile, suffered a particularly heavy series of losses, even as they maintained their majority. Republicans took 12 seats in the lower room, easily putting them within a very short distance of the 2022 retaking of the House.
The Senate also only went to the Democrats after a few wins in two second elections in Georgia on Jan. 5. Even then, the top room is divided 50-50, leaving no room for apostasy from their own party.
The memo released Tuesday noted that low-tendency voters – those who are expected to rarely turn out – were more vomiting for Republicans than Democrats. But the bigger culprit, pollsters said, was probably not accurately capturing the attitudes of certain voters.
That’s largely because many Trump voters simply didn’t participate in the election, the memo says. The former president sowed suspicion in institutions for months and sought to discredit polls that showed he was far behind Biden. As a result, many of his supporters simply did not respond to pollsters.
“What we’ve come to an agreement on is the idea that there’s something systematically different about the people we’ve reached and the people we’ve not reached,” the pollsters said. “This problem appears to have been compounded when Trump was on the ballot, and it is these particular voters who activated Trump who did not participate in polls.”
The firms recognized that the refusal of some voters to participate raises a particular problem for which they have no solution. They said they would “begin some experiments over the course of this year” to correct past mistakes in their methodology.
But they also warned against the impulse to “ over-correct ” in the aftermath of 2020, noting that the pollen mistake has been far more significant in presidential races – especially when Trump has been on the ballot.
“Our industry needs to figure out how to improve, and it won’t be easy,” the pollsters wrote in the memo. “Polls have been very accurate in some places and inaccurate in others, and the explanation is not yet clear.”
“We believe opinion polls play a vital role in our democracy and give a voice to the American people. And we believe we can and should do much better. ”