This is no small blessing that the polls went off like clockwork with respect to the McAuliffe/Youngkin race in Virginia, and also quite reliably in the Murphy/Ciattarelli match. This is how polling is supposed to work and what it’s there for. The polling industry was like a sick cow on its knees after the entire lead up to the 2016 election was revealed to be so wrong. Pollsters were hurting. They had never taken a shellacking like they did in 2016 and they feared taking another one, or maybe their profession would be gone.
The pollsters took heed of the 2016 disaster and did everything they could to tighten up procedures and do a reliable job of prognostication in 2020. They did somewhat better, but still fell way short of the mark. Why? The best idea posited at the time to explain Donald Trump wildly under-polling two elections in a row is that people who voted for Trump just didn’t want to declare that intention to a pollster. Why that may be is open for speculation. The closest answer anybody has come up with is that it was a kind of guilty secret, or that they were afraid that the pollsters would argue with them or perhaps even target them somehow. Paranoid much? Think about it. In this political climate with right-wing media ginning up fear 24/7, it’s not that outlandish a proposition.
An analyst at Roll Call comments:
Dare I say, Tuesday was a win for polling:
Youngkin led by about 1 point (47.9 percent to 47 percent) in the final FiveThirtyEight polling average and by about 2 points (48.5 percent to 46.8 percent) in the final RealClearPolitics average. Private polling showed a close race as well. Youngkin is on pace to win by 3 points. That’s pretty darn good in the face of all the criticism. And it’s more evidence to my working hypothesis that polling is more difficult when Donald Trump’s name is on the ballot.
A win for polling is a win indeed. This is no small thing. Scientific polling allows candidates and campaigns to assess the fate of a campaign and in a perfect world make adjustments when necessary. Accuracy is everything. The dream world that most of us dwelt in, myself certainly, during 2016 should never happen again. I remember all too well seeing the banner over at Daily Kos day after day, touting the 96% chance that Hillary had of winning the election. Wasn’t it grand?
I lived in such a stupor that when early returns started coming in on the east coast and a friend phoned me in hysterics, I told her to chill. I said, “Oh, Indiana is a red state. What did you expect? Not to worry.” And I went out and bought some hard lemonade to drink while waiting for the race to be called and then I was going to open the champagne when Hillary did her acceptance speech.
That champagne didn’t get opened until the following March when the GOP did such a profoundly stupid job of trying to repeal Obamacare and I decided that that was worth toasting, I was laughing my ass off so hard. Here’s the story I wrote to mock them. If you never read this, read it now. It’s called Steve Bannon Is Cleaning House. He’s Got A S*it List Posted in the War Room and Paul Ryan Is Toast. PolitiZoom didn’t exist in March of 2017, and I hadn’t started working for Daily Sound and Fury yet, so this was on Daily Kos. A lot of people laughed with me, this piece was up there for two and a half days, 638 recs. It was the first really good laugh I had in five months, that’s why I opened the champagne.
But getting back to Election Night 2016 and polling, I pray to God I never, ever have a disillusionment like I got that night. I became a different person that night. I realized that the America I had grown up in would never, ever have elected Donald Trump but the America I lived in then, would and did. This was beyond scared straight this was shocked sober.
Polling is an important institution. We rely on it and we need to be able to depend on it. I’m glad that that much is working normally again.
The hangover continues.
The Virginia race proved that when you give people a choice between a Republican and a Republican, they’ll pick the Republican every time.
When are the Dems going to wise up and quit running these weak-ass corporate Dems?
Oh well, McAuliffe can get a job at MSNBC (they like Republicans and fake libs) with Claire McCaskill. Another “moderate Democrat” who got her ass handed to her by an actual Republican.
As an engineer who has used Statistics extensively for research experiments, I can say that exit polls can be as accurate as you want them to be if done right. There are a great many people who can design the exit poll to almost certainty even in tight races. They were spot on right up to declaring Florida for Al Gore. When the Supreme Court stopped the counting the news media stopped doing exit polls. I didn’t realize they had started again. I think the Republicans will punish them for doing that.