6 Comments

Cohn has been writing about nonresponse bias and the tradeoffs in weighting by recalled past presidential vote for the last few days, which also strengthens my belief like yours that it's more likely we will see Democratic polling bias than the reverse this time again.

I'm worried that the nonpartisan industry standard pollsters will take a leaf from Trafalgar et al's book for future cycles if they get this year wrong again (ie, if the tossup Senate races end up being comfortable GOP wins). When the next inevitable Dem Blue Wave occurs (say 2026 or 2030 if we have unified GOP government by then), the polls may miss the outcome. Only this time, the GOP election denier faction may point to polling miss as evidence of election fraud as a pretext for shenanigans. Are you at all worried about the future of the industry becoming Trafalgar clones if the nonpartisan polls are wrong for 3 out of the 4 past cycles?

Expand full comment

I see no paradox here, given the anti-GOP bias of most pollsters: "538 currently rewards polls from the Trafalgar Group with an A- rating, for example, despite the fact that it has the 11th highest empirical bias toward Republicans out of nearly 500 pollsters they grade."

Expand full comment

With all Elliott's talk about Rep mo and bias in polls for Dems...Here is the last poll from the highest rated polling firm ABC/Washington Post....Talk to me Mr. Elliott

https://docs-cdn-prod.news-engineering.aws.wapo.pub/publish_document/e1e76ca3-d201-4fe0-962c-2612ea4be47e/published/e1e76ca3-d201-4fe0-962c-2612ea4be47e.pdf

Expand full comment

Hi Elliott,

I think it is likely that we will see polls overestimate Democrats again. Republicans are releasing more internal polling that shows them ahead. I assume that Democrats' internal polls have similar numbers. The “flooding the zone” takes don't make sense to me. More likely, Democrats are getting their hopes up to high.

I hope all is well!

Elliot

Expand full comment

You're probably right....It's all about turn-out

Expand full comment

I voted. I hope I get to do that again.

Expand full comment