Why Pollsters Wrong the Result of the US Presidential Election

MANILA, Philippines – How did some of the top American pollsters get the results of the 2020 American presidential election wrong?

According to an expert pollster, this could be attributed to difficulties with telephone surveys.

While some polls projected a landslide victory for now-president-elect Joe Biden, the race was closer than pre-election polls suggested. Biden eventually won the race with more than 279 electoral votes through Sunday, defeating President Donald Trump after four days of counting the votes.

John Gosby, a renowned pollster, author, and founder of Zogby Strategies, said he believed the polls were wrong because they oversampled Democratic voters against Republicans.

“I saw a number of polls in the months and weeks and days leading up to the election that were clearly oversampling Democrats over Republicans,” Gosby told participants of the US Foreign Press Center virtual reporting tour. , Which featured the Inquirer, in a recent briefing. on the analysis of the election.

But he said he didn’t think there was “anything planned” for this development.

Media, university surveys

He said some of the polls conducted by the media and university networks outperformed Democrats by 9, 10 and 11 percentage points.

Gosby said his polling company got the correct numbers on the voters who cast their ballots on Election Day, the turnout of blacks and more men and women who voted for Biden.

He explained that most of these voting errors could be “attributed to the fact that we are seeing the end of telephone polls.” Telephone polling is one of the gold standard methods used by American pollsters.

“There are very few Americans who already have landlines and are now educated not to answer landlines,” Gosby said.

He also described the way people responded to his inquiries on mobile phones as “lousy”. Pollsters have trouble asking a lot of questions of people they end up talking to on the phone, he said.

“You can’t do that when someone is walking down the street or in the men’s room somewhere and just makes the mistake of answering the phone,” he added.

Online sampling

But Gosby said pollsters were more likely to reach people and get better responses through online sampling. The sampling distribution is also better over the Internet, he said.

“We’re getting better response rates by race and by younger people not answering a phone,” Gosby said of online sampling.

He said the polling industry was now “at a crossroads” but added that these were “methodological problems, not ideological ones.”

Some American pollsters were also wrong about the outcome of the 2016 presidential race between Trump and Hillary Clinton.

Doug Schwartz, director and vice president of the Quinnipiac University survey, said this happened because some of these pollsters did not attach importance to the education of their samples in some key states, including Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.

In briefing reporters on the virtual reporting tour ahead of the Nov. 3 election, Schwartz said this resulted in pollsters having overrepresented white voters with college education and underrepresented white voters without college education.

He said it was white voters with no college education that were Trump’s key supporters.

Schwartz said this omission was one of the reasons why some of the polls underestimated Trump’s support in the 2016 election.

These surveys were now expected to be reliable because they weighed their samples by education, he said.

He said he still trusted the top pollsters who use gold standard methods and that included being transparent, using live interviews and calling on cell phones.

Among the polls he said he trusted were the Pew Research Poll, ABC News, Washington Post, NBC News, Wall Street Journal, CNN and Fox News.

“As pollsters, nothing is more important to us than getting it right. Our reputation is at stake, ”said Schwartz.

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