TDL Brief: What’s next for polling?
On Tuesday night, Nov. 3, as election results started to roll in, it became clear that the U.S. presidential race was going to be closer than many polls and models had previously suggested.
Media outlets concluded quickly that there had been a gigantic polling misfire, even worse than in 2016. The Washington Post published an article entitled “The polling industry can’t sweep its failure under the rug,” and The Conversation wrote that the 2020 election was “An embarrassing failure for election pollsters,” to name a few.
“To all the pollsters out there, you have no idea what you’re doing.”
— Lindsey Graham, after rather easily winning re-election to the Senate despite pre-election polls indicating a much closer race.
Pollsters and forecasters argue that it’s premature to diagnose the polls as wildly incorrect. In many states—including battleground states such as Arizona and Georgia—the polls turned out to be quite accurate. And to be fair, FiveThirtyEight’s final projections gave Biden less than a 1-in-3 chance of a landslide. Projections for the popular vote are likely to be pretty accurate.
But, there were definitely significant misses at the state and district level—for Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, and Florida, in particular. Polling for senate races also projected more competitive races in Iowa, Maine, and South Carolina than the ones we actually saw.
And when you look at the polling misses in both 2016 and 2020, the errors don’t seem random: they tend to come out in favor of the Republican Party. That is, there aren’t really any states where polls suggested that the Republican candidate would win, which were in fact won by the Democrat. The polling errors seem to go only in one direction. Moreover, the polls seem to miss not only in the same direction nationwide, but in the same states.
In light of this, TDL has compiled a list of hypotheses that may shed light on what, if anything, went wrong, and where to go from here.
Tom Spiegler, TDL Managing Director
About the Authors
Dan Pilat
Dan is a Co-Founder and Managing Director at The Decision Lab. He is a bestselling author of Intention - a book he wrote with Wiley on the mindful application of behavioral science in organizations. Dan has a background in organizational decision making, with a BComm in Decision & Information Systems from McGill University. He has worked on enterprise-level behavioral architecture at TD Securities and BMO Capital Markets, where he advised management on the implementation of systems processing billions of dollars per week. Driven by an appetite for the latest in technology, Dan created a course on business intelligence and lectured at McGill University, and has applied behavioral science to topics such as augmented and virtual reality.
Dr. Sekoul Krastev
Sekoul is a Co-Founder and Managing Director at The Decision Lab. He is a bestselling author of Intention - a book he wrote with Wiley on the mindful application of behavioral science in organizations. A decision scientist with a PhD in Decision Neuroscience from McGill University, Sekoul's work has been featured in peer-reviewed journals and has been presented at conferences around the world. Sekoul previously advised management on innovation and engagement strategy at The Boston Consulting Group as well as on online media strategy at Google. He has a deep interest in the applications of behavioral science to new technology and has published on these topics in places such as the Huffington Post and Strategy & Business.
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