The chief political analyst for the New York Times stated that the 2022 midterms may be just another miss in a long line of misses for the polling industry.
Democrats have been surging across the polls in quite a few key battleground states. However, as stated in an article titled, “Yes, the Polling Warning Signs Are Flashing Again,” Nate Cohn, the New York Times Chief Political Analyst, claimed that the exact same errors regarding the collection of data are once again happening in the same areas throughout recent polling, which means that many Democrats may not be quite a strong as the reported polls actually seem to indicate.
Cohn started off his piece with a data table from 2020 which highlighted the gap between university and media polling and the actual results of the elections in over 11 of the key battleground states. Among the most noticeable errors:
- in Ohio, polls showed that Trump led Biden by less than one point: he won it by 8, a 7-point miss.
- Trump led in Iowa by 1 point; he won it by 8, another 7-point miss.
- in Wisconsin, President Joe Biden had a 10-point advantage over former President Trump in the statewide polling average; Biden won the state by less than one point, a 9-point miss.
- In Pennsylvania, Biden led Trump by 5 points in the polls; he won the state by 1 point, a 4-point miss.
- in Florida, Biden held a 2-point advantage over Trump; Trump won Florida by 3 points, a 5-point miss.
“We created this poll error table for a reason: Early in the 2020 cycle, we noticed that Joe Biden seemed to be outperforming [Hillary] Clinton in the same places where the polls overestimated her [in 2016],” remembered Cohn. “That pattern didn’t necessarily mean the polls would be wrong — it could have just reflected Mr. Biden’s promised strength among white working-class voters, for instance — but it was a warning sign.”
“That warning sign is flashing again: Democratic Senate candidates are outrunning expectations in the same places where the polls overestimated Mr. Biden in 2020 and Mrs. Clinton in 2016,” he stated.
A similar event is happening currently in states such as Wisconsin in 2022, stated Cohn. As reported by the electoral fundamentals index from FiveThirtyEight, Johnson is sitting as a two-point favorite over Lieutenant Governor Mandela Barnes. However, a recent poll from Marquette University, which was labeled by Cohn as the “gold-standard” in Wisconsin, has Barnes up front by 7 points. Wisconsin was “ground zero for survey error in 2020,” expressed Cohn, and the possible polling mistakes that happened between the 2020 and the 2022 elections seem quite similar.
“It raises the possibility that the apparent Democratic strength in Wisconsin and elsewhere is a mirage — an artifact of persistent and unaddressed biases in survey research,” stated Cohn. “If the polls are wrong yet again, it will not be hard to explain. Most pollsters haven’t made significant methodological changes since the last election.”
The analysis from Cohn took place just in the wake of at least one independent pollster highlighting that the institutional polling firms had messed up quite badly in regard to the primary battleground states in 2014, 2016, 2018, and 2020. As part of his statements on his podcast, “Inside the Numbers,” Richard Baris, the director of Big Data Poll, pointed out that Ron Johnson sat just behind former Senator Russ Feingold for the majority of the election cycle in 2016 throughout public polling, by an almost double-digit margin in some cases; the final polling average, as reported by RealClearPolitics, placed Feingold just 2.7 points ahead. Johnson ended up winning the election by a whopping 3.4 points, which is nearly a five-point difference.
