Pollsters still searching for fixes as 2022 voting nears

The Washington Times ^ | Monday, September 5, 2022 | Stephen Dinan

[TBP]

Missing Republicans plagued pollsters across the board in surveys ahead of the 2020 election, leading to bungled projections and a new round of soul-searching by the industry.

Yet as voters prepare for November’s midterm elections, it’s not clear whether the pollsters have solved anything.

“In the media polls, no, they have not fixed it,” said Jim McLaughlin, a Republican Party pollster. “I used to think it was incompetence back in 2016. Now I think they do it purposely to tamp down on Republican support.”

Election polling, or “horse race” surveys, have another wrinkle: They never know who, exactly, will show up to cast a ballot.

Many pollsters compensate by trying to identify “likely” voters and “weight” their results to match what they believe will be the turnout.

[TBP]

This is a subscriber-only article, unfortunately. But I have excerpted the essential problems with most polls. If you can read the whole article, please do. If not, this should be a decent summary.

[mewzilla]

...missing Republicans...

Good one.

[decal]

I’m much more worried about the missing ‘Rats on the mail-in ballots...

[Red Badger]

Fix what? The ELECTION????........................🤔

[chajin]

The original idea behind polls was to get a picture of the electorate for the sake of general public information. Now it is used as intel, and the public, particularly the conservative public, knows this, and refuses to provide intel to the adversarial foes who desire it.

[fwdude]

“...searching for fixes...”

Obviously drug addicts.

[fwdude]

Nearly all polls are “push” polls now, eliciting an engineered response by playing with the language used to ask a question.

[clearcarbon]

"Missing Republicans plagued pollsters across the board in surveys ahead of the 2020 election, leading to bungled projections and a new round of soul-searching by the industry."

Something like, Republicans won't cooperate with pollsters?

[TBP]

almost always give the “wrong” response to push polls.

[backwoods-engineer]

I won’t answer a single survey.

[joma89]

Polls = Lies

[TBP]

A poll is a snapshot of where the race stands at a given moment. But given all the problems with how the samples are constructed, reaching people, weighting, and the use of registered voters versus likely voters all blur the snapshot.

[jmaroneps37]

They just can’t figure out what lie to tell.

[joma89]

A poll is not a snapshot of anything. It is a lie and pure information warfare meant to affect the voting patterns when the real voting starts.