The Polling Crisis
“Don’t sweat the polls,” The Atlantic reassured us this October. In 2016, forecaster Sam Wang vowed to eat a bug if Donald Trump won — and ended up having to. The memory was still fresh, but in the intervening years pollsters had worked hard to regain our trust. As The Atlantic (and just about every other respectable publication) explained, the 2016 error was due to late deciders and the failure to weight by education. This year, most voters had made up their mind long before the election and pollsters had corrected the weighting mistake. Everything would be fine.
When the 2020 results came in, the reassurances vanished like a puff of smoke. Not only was this year’s statewide error as large as in 2016, but each major national poll was off by at least 3.5 points, while the Senate polls were even worse than the general election ones.
America is in the middle of a polling crisis — or is it? FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver told us there’s no need to panic. After all, the magnitude of this year’s polling error was about average by historical standards (that is, from 1972 onwards). Indeed, the 2020 error is nowhere near as bad as 1980’s, when state and national polls were off by nearly 9 points, completely missing Ronald Reagan’s landslide victory over Jimmy Carter.
