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2020 US Political Polls Were Least Accurate in Decades, Analysis Finds

Ken Bredemeier

   WASHINGTON - Nearly nine months after last year's U.S. presidential
   election, there's one more loser -- political polls -- with a new
   analysis showing the 2020 surveys in advance of the November 3 vote
   were among the least accurate in decades.

   The polling industry's professional organization, the American
   Association for Public Opinion Research, says that it reviewed 2,858
   polls, including hundreds of national and state-level polls, and found
   that they consistently understated the support for then-President
   Donald Trump, although he lost the election to Democrat Joe Biden, now
   the country's 46th president.

   The group found that the surveys overstated the margin between Biden
   and Trump by 3.9 percentage points in the national popular vote and 4.3
   percentage points in state polls.

   The polling organization said the percentage error rate was of an
   "unusual magnitude," the highest in 40 years for national popular vote
   surveys and at least 20 years for state-level polls.

   But the election outcome in the polling was entirely accurate at the
   end of the lengthy campaign, with all 66 surveys conducted in the two
   weeks prior to the vote showing that Biden would defeat Trump. Polls
   for Senate contests were less accurate, with pre-election surveys
   correctly hitting only two-thirds of the winners.

   In the actual vote, Biden defeated Trump by a 51.3% to 46.8% margin, a
   vote count of 81.3 million to 74.2 million.

   The polling group said, "Whether the candidates were running for
   president, senator, or governor, poll margins overall suggested that
   Democratic candidates would do better and Republican candidates would
   do worse relative to the final certified vote."

   The pollsters say they do not know why the pre-election findings were
   off by the actual margins, even as Biden won, as surveys in months of
   polling overwhelmingly suggested a Biden victory.

   In 2016, pollsters underestimated Trump's support in key states he
   unexpectedly won en route to a four-year term in the White House. The
   pollsters concluded in the aftermath of that election they had failed
   to take into account an education divide in American voting habits,
   that college educated voters tended to support Democrats more than
   Republicans.

   The authors of the 2020 polling analysis say they are not certain what
   caused the errors last year but suggested that the declining response
   rate among some people, especially Republicans, to polling inquiries,
   might be a key factor.

   Trump often assailed polls showing him losing, falsely declaring them
   as "fake," or aimed at suppressing enthusiasm for his reelection.

   The pollsters say it is impossible to know the reasons people do not
   participate in polls when they are not answering pollsters' questions
   in the first place.

   "Identifying conclusively why polls overstated the
   Democratic-Republican margin relative to the certified vote appears to
   be impossible with the available data," the report says.