Regular readers of COTTonLINE know we like and share polling data as it gives an insight into the public mood. It is obviously to our (and your) advantage for polls to accurately reflect the various facets of that mood, and they’ve had accuracy difficulties over the last decade or two.
Politico reports polling industry wide efforts to improve accuracy and thereby ability-to-predict.
Both the internal polling that drives campaigns’ decisions and the media surveys that help shape coverage of the races are already changing: Pollsters are trying new ways to collect data, like contacting potential respondents by text message instead of phone calls, and seeking new ways of adjusting the data after to make it more accurately reflect the whole electorate.
The innovations are not limited to sampling and data collection. But devising new weighting parameters — ways to adjust the results to better reflect the electorate — is more difficult. That’s because one of the main culprits of the 2020 election miss appears to be people who don’t respond to polls — so-called “nonresponse bias.” Voters in that group were more likely to support Trump, which made it harder for polls to reflect the true measure of his support.
In our household we tend to ignore calls from those we don’t know, who aren’t already in our contact list. Spam calling is the culprit, 2-3 decades ago we always answered incoming calls. Spam callers have convinced us to do otherwise, and I’m certain we are not outliers in that regard.
