I get questions from readers of a national political site I have been writing for since 2004 about why I think the polls this cycle are underperforming when it comes to Kamala Harris.
It has become increasingly difficult to poll presidential elections. This is particularly true when the candidate is Donald Trump. He has performed better than the polls suggested in 2016 and 2020. In 2016 after Comey renewed his investigation and into Hillary Clinton’s emails 8 days before election day, it was thought that the polling couldn’t account for this so virtually everyone, including myself, missed badly. Until then it was conventional wisdom that someone like him would have disqualified himself from that office and it would impact the outcome.
In 2020, polling agencies took this factor into consideration and continued to poll likely voters using the historical models it previously relied on. Polling data is run through a process similar to what insurance companies calculate risk. It relies on realtively small sample sizes to affix a percentage of probability.
In 2020 it missed because the questions it asked were not specific enough to ferrret out the “shy” Trump voter. He had more support than the data could identify and the historical models kicked in as well.
For the 2024 election, having been embarrassed by the two previous election misses, the polling industry basically scrapped the established model and began anew using the previous two elections as a baseline. This has resulted in an over correction for Trump in my opinion and that of others.
This is essentially a two issue race at the core, immigration and reproductive rights. I suggest that reproductive rights is galvanizing voters much more than immigration this cycle. To a degree that polls can’t capture it.
New and low propensity voters are practically invisible to pollsters so they essentially have to guess what that turnout might be. If it looks anything like the special elections, they may miss badly on these two groups. Abortion being front and center on the ballot, following Dobbs, is unique situation for which we have no recent precedent to draw upon. Previously it was only an abstraction that this freedom might be in jeopardy. This has been replaced with the stark reality of its arrival.
We have examples of dramatic polling discrepancies showing up in state ballot initiatives and special elections post Dobbs surrounding reproductive rights where they missed badly, in some cases by 20 points or more.
As I have written about previously, this is a outlier election cycle, outside what the polling agencies and news media will to be able to account for. A way for a news organization to remain safe in their predictions and appear nonpartisan is to just parrot what the polling companies are offering up. Harris will over perform these predictions. Some will be surprised.
