DES MOINES, Iowa — After months of whining that candidates are cherry-picking, bragging and biasing candidates, polling for the 2024 election became a reality for the first time in Monday's Iowa caucuses. Her gender is about to be confirmed.
Skepticism about political polls is as much a part of modern presidential campaigns as visits to the Iowa State Fair or the Red Arrow Diner in Manchester, New Hampshire.
But pollsters themselves and experts in the field are confident that polls are generally spot-on if you know how to analyze them correctly.
“Polls are showing pretty negative attention from most candidates. So if they do a poll and a candidate has a 4-5% approval rating, the first thing they do is It denies the credibility of the poll,” Spencer Kimball, executive director and professor at Emerson College Polling, told the Post.
“Industries in general take a lot of hits every time we do a poll, because people who don't like the results tend to find inconsistencies in the data and try to ignore what the data is suggesting. It’s from.”
Understand the margin of error
Experts say the key to understanding polls is understanding the margin of error.
“When you get down to the level of specificity, polling is not a tool that has that kind of power,” said Patrick Murray, director of the Monmouth University Public Opinion Research Institute.
“It's a poll that tries to predict a population that doesn't exist yet, so there can be some margin of error,” he added. “These things have to be taken with a grain of salt.”
The margin of error is often underemphasized in public perception and media coverage of public opinion polls, but as racial tensions around the country grow, the importance of the margin of error becomes more important, Murray said. insisted.
“One-point and three-point polls should be reported in exactly the same way. It's a close race and it could go either way,” he lamented. “But that won't happen.”
Samara Klar, a professor at the University of Arizona School of Government and Public Policy who studies political behavior, cautioned against gleaning too much information from recent polls about the Nov. 5 general election.
“We're seeing a lot of polls where both candidates are actually outside the margin of error. And I'm not sure we can actually assume anything about who will beat the General at this point,” she said. Told.
“I think voting will help us understand who the candidates will be.”
“Snapshot in time”
Polls provide a window into the mood of everyday Americans, Klar said, but they are not a crystal ball.
“What polls are really useful for is knowing what people think now. Polls aren't necessarily designed to predict what people will do in the future,” she explained. .
A significant complication with electoral voting is the fact that some voters tend to change their minds late in the campaign.
“If we can predict whether a poll is reliable, we can predict the actual outcome,” Murray said. “The purpose of the poll at this point is to tell us what's going on.”
“Things change. There's a lot of money being spent in this election. And in general, people aren't paying attention to the candidate, the president. [race] It's more of an exception, especially in down-ballot races,” Kimball added.
“As people started listening and hearing things, we realized that opinions change and these snapshots of time that might be accurate at one moment don't last.”
Unstable 2024
This election cycle in particular looks extremely volatile given the confluence of potentially politically combustible factors, including former President Donald Trump's pending criminal case.
“There has never been more interest in polling, and at the same time it has never been more difficult,” said Don Levy, director of the Siena College Research Institute.
“Mr. Trump is actively working to avoid going to trial in March. If the trial actually takes place and the records of the trial and commentary on the trial are available in a steady manner, that would have a huge impact on voters. There is a possibility.
“And you actually end up influencing a small group of voters.”
Unanswered questions about Trump's legal status and the turbulent geopolitical environment could prompt voters to change their calculus.
Still, if 2024 turns out to be a rematch of 2020's Trump vs. Biden campaign, Kimball said voters may already be heavily entrenched.
“If you look at this from a 30,000-foot perspective, it's going to be a very volatile election. There's a lot going on. There's a global war going on, there's trouble domestically.” Kimball said.
“Conversely, if it's going to be Biden and Trump, then we have two known candidates. There's not much more the public can know,” he continued. “Normally you don't see a rematch like that.”
But what about 2016?
Perhaps the biggest blow to the polling industry came during the 2016 election, when many polls appeared to rule out Trump's upset victory over Hillary Clinton.
“We're looking back at what we've done in the past. We know there were failures in 2016 and 2020 for a variety of reasons,” Murray said, adding that eight years ago the 45th president rejected the idea that there was a “hidden” vote.
“Ultimately, the problem was twofold: the sample underrepresented people without college degrees, and people who were more likely to vote for Hillary Clinton were staying home. '' he said.
Levy said there was “probably an insufficient number of polls in some Rust Belt states” ahead of the 2016 presidential election, and some polls “didn't take educational background into account enough.” That's what it means.
He believes that in 2020, there was “systematic hesitancy among fervent Trump supporters to participate in the polls,” and that polling organizations were making adjustments across the board to take that into account. I think there are.
“Voting as a field has improved,” he said.
“Were people overestimating the Republicans in 2022? I don't think they were,” he added of the midterm elections, in which Democrats performed better than expected. “Maybe some people were so worried about losing out on people who voted for President Trump that they probably tended to focus more in that direction.”
Even if pollsters are getting this election cycle right, they're not holding their breath in praise.
“There are countless examples of people calling me and yelling and yelling at me before the election,” Levy said. You don't get a call saying, “Hey, Don, you got it right.” ”
