[This is the second in a series on polling challenges and changes in 2024; the first was about what went wrong in 2020.]
Public pollsters ended up with egg on their face after the last two presidential elections.
It’s possible they will after this election, too. But if you think nothing about polling has changed since then, you’re mistaken.
The changes pollsters have made this cycle may or may not yield a more accurate result this November. That’s impossible to predict. But many of these changes are substantial, and, on balance, they probably do reduce the risk of another high-profile polling misfire — even if there are no guarantees.
Over the last four years, there have been four basic kinds of changes in the polling world:
Pollsters adopted different methods of data collection, like surveys taken by text or mail, rather than by phone.
Pollsters adopted new methods of “weighting,” where they made statistical adjustments to try to better account for underrepresented groups.
Pollsters didn’t change their practices, but benefited from new data that improved longstanding methods.
The makeup of the pollsters changed, as some pollsters left the game and others joined the fray.
These changes don’t account for every single change pollsters have made, of course. Pollsters tinker constantly with their procedures, even when they make no wholesale changes at all. Still, below are many of the big ones. Here’s how each might — ever so slightly — reduce the risk of another big miss.
Data collection: The mailFifteen years ago, nearly every major political poll was conducted by randomly dialing telephone numbers, a technique known as random-digit dialing. Gallup, ABC/Washington Post, CBS/New York Times, Pew Research, you name it — this was the kind of poll they conducted. Today, only one prolific pollster, Quinnipiac, is still doing it this way.
Instead, pollsters are using many different methods to find respondents and conduct surveys, including sending text messages and recruiting survey-takers online. But perhaps a more surprising change has been many pollsters’ move toward using mail, a method known as address-based sampling.
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