Trump did win, of course, and his victory highlights the inherent fallibility of polls. “It just screwed up the whole poll, where it went heavily to Trump,” Bonier said. Because there were so few men of color in his exact age range being surveyed, his voice was weighted as if he represented the universe of young Black men. of TargetSmart, a polling and analytics company that works with Democratic candidates and progressive organizations, told me about a 2016 online survey, where a young Black man reported that he planned to vote for Trump. Polls are based on models, and models are built on assumptions about who is likely to vote and how much weight to afford each demographic cohort in that universe of likely voters. People whose candidate is losing may not respond to pollsters, but people who are civically engaged-and research shows that those people tend to be Democrats-do. A reliance on mobile-phone numbers might miss rural voters who don’t have cell service. When pollsters rely on landlines, they tend to get older voters.
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According to Andrew Mercer, a senior research methodologist at the Pew Research Center, polls also tend to vary because “there are a lot of subjective decisions about how to go about things that different pollsters do differently for a variety of reasons.” They are inconsistent because people are inconsistent. And suddenly the polls were showing something completely different.” Polls are sensitive to the news because people are sensitive to the news. Andrew Weissert, who runs a Republican polling firm outside of Chicago, told me, “I remember, in 2012, when Mitt Romney had a stellar debate performance, and, all of a sudden, people were writing President Obama’s political obituary. By the time the public sees a poll, that moment will have passed. They are snapshots taken at a particular moment in time. The collective disbelief when Clinton lost was tinged with confusion: How could the pollsters have been so wrong? Now, with Joe Biden leading Trump by double digits in the lead-up to Election Day, according to the latest NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist survey, the question has to be asked: Are voters hoping for a Biden victory about to fall in the same trap? Buoyed by the polls, Democrats-especially Democratic women-approached November 8th with a joyful sense of inevitability. Five days later, ABC News released a tracking poll showing her ahead of Trump by twelve points. On October 18, 2016, the New York Times gave Hillary Clinton a ninety-one-per-cent chance of beating Donald Trump.