Leading Democratic Party pollsters on Tuesday acknowledged that they “did not meet” their own expectations in the 2020 election polls, saying the “big mistakes” led them to believe Democrats would have a better election day than they did. it finally materialized.
In a note, five of the largest Democratic companies: ALG Research, Garin-Hart-Yang Research Group, GBAO Strategies, Global Strategy Group, and Normington Petts, pointed to a litany of potential problems in their polls as they did not predict exactly who would make the election, in fact, misinterpret the political attitudes of certain groups of voters.
But ultimately, according to pollsters, the analysis of its 2020 did not provide a clear answer.
“There were several factors that may have contributed to the voting error in 2020 and there is no single, definitive answer, which makes solving the problem especially frustrating,” the election companies wrote in the note.
The memorandum, which was first reported Tuesday by Politico, highlights Democrats’ challenges in diagnosing what went wrong in November.
Democrats won the White House, retained control of the House, and two months later won a Senate majority. But the results were still a long way from the kind of electoral outburst they had expected, and that the polls made many believe they would see it.
Data collected in the weeks and months prior to election day were displayed President Biden
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But Biden’s margin of victory was much lower than many Democrats expected. The note from the five pollsters noted that “thanks to the peculiarities of the polling station, the difference between a new administration and four more years of Donald Trump was only 43,000 votes cast in Wisconsin, Georgia and Arizona.”
House Democrats, meanwhile, ended up suffering a particularly tough set of losses, although they retained a majority. Republicans won 12 seats in the lower house, easily placing them at an astonishing distance from the House’s 2022 recovery.
The Senate, similarly, only ran in the Democrats after a pair of victories in two by-elections in Georgia on Jan. 5. Even in this, the upper house is divided between 50 and 50, leaving Democrats room for defections from their own party.
The note released on Tuesday noted that low-leaning voters – those expected to appear infrequently – broke more for Republicans than Democrats. But the biggest culprit, according to pollsters, was probably a failure to accurately capture the attitudes of certain voters.
This is largely because many Trump voters simply did not participate in the voting, the note says. The former president spent months sowing distrust in the institutions and trying to discredit the polls that showed him far behind Biden. As a result, many of his supporters simply did not respond to the polls.
“What we’ve decided is the idea that there’s something systematically different about the people we reached and the people we didn’t,” the interviewers said. “It seems that this problem has been amplified when Trump was at the polls, and it is these particular voters that Trump activated who did not participate in the polls.”
The companies acknowledged that the refusal of some voters to participate is a particular problem to which they have no solution. They said they will “embark on several experiments throughout this year” that will try to correct past mistakes in their methodology.
But they also warned against the urge to “over-correct” themselves by 2020, noting that the error of voting error has been much more significant in presidential races, especially when Trump has participated in the vote.
“Our industry needs to figure out how to improve, and it won’t be easy,” the interviewers wrote in the note. “The survey was very accurate in some places and inaccurate in others, and the explanation for why is not yet clear.”
“We believe that the poll plays a critical role in our democracy and gives a voice to the American people. And we believe we can, and must, do much better.”