DES MOINES, Iowa – After months of candidates cherry-picking, boasting and complaining that they were biased, polls in the 2024 race are about to get their first reality check with the Iowa caucuses of Monday.
Skepticism about political polls is as much a part of the modern presidential campaign as visits to the Iowa State Fair and the Red Arrow Diner in Manchester, NH.
But both the pollsters themselves and experts in the field trust that surveys are generally accurate, if you know how to analyze them correctly.
“The polls receive quite negative attention from most candidates. So when you put out a poll and it has a candidate at 4 or 5%, the first thing they do is dismiss the credibility of the poll,” Spencer Kimball, professor and executive director of Emerson College Polling, told The Post.
“The industry as a whole takes a lot of hits every time it releases a survey because people who don’t like those results will find inconsistencies in the data to try to dismiss what they suggest.”
Understand the margin of error
The key to understanding any survey, experts say, is understanding the margin of error.
“When we get down to that level of specificity, surveys just aren’t the kind of tool that has that kind of laser capability,” said Monmouth University Survey Institute director Patrick Murray.
“It is subject to a certain degree of error, because it is a survey that attempts to predict a population that does not yet exist,” he added. “You have to accept these things with caution.”
Public perception and media reports about polls often don’t put enough emphasis on the margin of error, which becomes more important as races tighten across the country, Murray argued.
Ron DeSantis hopes to exceed the expectations placed on him in a series of recent polls in Iowa. Getty Images
“The 1-point and 3-point polls should be reported exactly the same – it’s a close race and could go either way,” he lamented. “But that’s not what happens.”
Samara Klar, a professor at the University of Arizona’s School of Government and Public Policy who studies political behavior, cautioned against taking too much advantage of recent polls from the Nov. 5 general election.
“We’re seeing a lot of polls where really none of the candidates are outside the margin of error. And I don’t know if we can really assume anything about who is going to win an overall right now,” she said.
“I think the polls can help us understand who the nominees will be.”
‘Snapshots in time’
While polls can give insight into the mood of ordinary Americans, they are not crystal balls, according to Klar.
“What polls do really well is tell us what people think now. Surveys are not necessarily designed to predict what people are going to do in the future,” she explained.
A major complication of election polls is the fact that some voters tend to change their minds at the end of any campaign.
“If we could predict whether the polls are going to be reliable, we could predict the actual outcome,” Murray said. “The point of polls right now is to say where things are right now.”
Nikki Haley has touted recent polls as evidence that her presidential campaign has gained momentum in recent weeks. AP
“Things change. A lot of money is being spent on these elections. And, in general, people do not pay attention to the candidates (a president [race] “It’s more of an exception, but especially in negative elections,” Kimball added.
“As people start to tune in and listen to things, we notice that opinions change and these snapshots in time that might be accurate at a given moment don’t stand on their own.”
A volatile 2024
This particular election cycle appears very volatile given the confluence of potential politically combustible factors, such as former President Donald Trump’s pending criminal cases.
“There has never been so much interest in polling, and at the same time, it has never been so difficult,” said Don Levy, director of the Siena College Research Institute.
“Trump is working aggressively to try not to go to trial in March. If the trial goes ahead and you receive a constant dose of transcripts of that trial, comments on that trial, that could very well sway voters.
“And really, it’s about influencing a small group of voters.”
President Biden’s re-election campaign has downplayed the avalanche of dismal polls against him. REUTERS
Lingering questions about Trump’s legal status, a tumultuous geopolitical environment and more could prompt voters to change their calculations.
Still, if 2024 ends up becoming a 2020 rematch between Trump and President Biden, voters may already be very entrenched, according to Kimball.
“If we look at this from a 30,000-foot perspective, this should be a very volatile election. There’s a lot going on. There are global wars and there are problems here at home,” Kimball said.
“On the other hand, if it ends up being Biden and Trump, you will have two known candidates. There is not much more that the public can know,” he continued. “We don’t normally see that kind of revenge.”
But what about 2016?
Perhaps the biggest blow to the polling industry came during the 2016 election, when a series of polls apparently overlooked Trump’s surprise victory over Hillary Clinton.
“We look at what we have done in the past. We know we made mistakes for a variety of reasons in 2016 and 2020,” said Murray, who rejected the idea that there was a “hidden” vote to elect the 45th president eight years ago.
“It really came down to two issues: that the samples did not represent people without a college degree and that there were a significant number of likely Hillary Clinton voters who stayed home,” he said.
Donald Trump has boasted of his commanding lead in recent polls. AP
For Levy, “there was probably an insufficient number of polls in some of the Rust Belt states” before the 2016 presidential election and some polls did not “take educational attainment sufficiently into account.”
He does believe that in 2020 “there was a systemic reluctance on the part of avid Trump supporters to participate in polls” and that pollsters in general have recalibrated to take that into account.
“Polls as a field got better,” he said.
“Did people overestimate the Republicans in ’22? I don’t think we did,” he added of the midterm elections, in which Democrats did better than expected. “Maybe some people were so worried about not seeing the Trump voter… that maybe there was a tendency to lean in that direction.”
Even if pollsters time this election cycle correctly, they don’t expect cheers.
“I can give you countless cases of people calling me to yell at me before an election,” Levy said, “and all of a sudden, when we get it right, like we do most of the time, after the election, somehow the phone The calls don’t come in saying, ‘Hey, Don, you did good.'”
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