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This was an especially tough race to forecast because turnout surged to levels not seen in a century, which included lots of new voters. Polls tend to focus on
by koboll 6y ago
This was an especially tough race to forecast because turnout surged to levels not seen in a century, which included lots of new voters.
Polls tend to focus on "likely voters", which is defined mostly by who's voted before. So something like the massive surge we saw in Latino Trump voters in Florida and Texas would be difficult to see coming unless you have some reliable way of forecasting which seemingly-unlikely-voters will actually turn out this time around, which is extremely difficult -- people tend to be much more likely to say they'll vote than to actually vote, so simply asking them isn't reliable.
"Shy Trump voters" probably isn't the core problem in an unusually high-turnout election. The problem is that there's no real way of predicting who pollsters should be interviewing.
- lostcolony 6y ago"The problem is that there's no real way of predicting who pollsters should be interviewing. That isn't a problem. That's why random sampling and confidence intervals exist. "Polls tend to focus on 'likely voters'" - no they don't. They randomly sample, and then ask people whether they plan to vote or not; they still get, and report, the numbers amongst registered voters, vs likely (as defined however) voters.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y agoThey sample as randomly as they can, but that's not very random, because a non-random subset of the people they call don't want to talk to them. If you've ever seen a polling organization discuss "weighting", this problem is what they're talking about - they have to adjust the raw poll results based on their estimates of how response rates were biased, or they'll get answers that they know are wrong.
- lostcolony 6y agoWhich is a different problem than "who pollsters should be interviewing", which is what I was responding to.