After the 2020 Election, Polling Is Dead
Whatever the final outcome of the election, we know one thing for sure: the pollsters screwed up royally. And the heyday of celebrity pollsters seems to be coming to an end.
A poll worker holds a “secrecy folder” used to conceal a voted ballot from view in a polling place at Bloomfield United Methodist Church on November 3, 2020 in Des Moines, Iowa. (Mario Tama / Getty Images)
After the debacle of the 2016 election — when polls were off by an average of 5 points — polling institutions revised their methods. Some started dialing more cell phones. Others shifted focus toward swing states. Many began weighting responses by education. “Perhaps, after four years of hand-wringing, the polls will show they were all right after all,” FiveThirtyEight surmised after conducting its own survey of leading pollsters less than a month before the 2020 general election.
So far, the error rate looks the same. Bookmakers, looking at the polls, put their money on Democrats taking back the Senate. That now seems vanishingly unlikely. Polling outfits divined a blue wave that would expand the Democratic majority in the House. The Democrats lost seats.
If 2016 didn’t prove it, 2020 certainly did: the polling industry is in crisis.
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