WHAT’S UP WITH THE POLLS?

[Geee]

Powerline:

WHAT’S UP WITH THE POLLS?

 

There’s quite a variance in the polling numbers for Trump and Hillary Clinton, complicated by the fact that some polls only offer a choice between the two major party candidates, and ignore Gary Johnson and the Green Party’s Jill Stein. Some polls have Hillary leading by as much as 15 points, while the Los Angeles Times poll continues to show Trump leading or virtually tied. (The methodology of the Times poll has received a lot of criticism, yet the Times poll was very close to the exact result in 2012.)

 

Usually when you hear a candidate or his support

ers claim that the polls are wrong, it’s because they know they are losing. This is one reason why Trump has pivoted from talking about how great his poll numbers are to the “rigged election” theme. Could this be the first time that the majority of the polls are completely off? That’s what happened in Britain’s last general election, where the polls badly underestimated Conservative Party strength, which was attributed to “shy Tories.” (See charts below.) And the Brexit polls were wrong, too. Could there be a lot of “shy Trumpers” out there?

 

Maybe, but it’s worth pausing for a moment and understanding why polling is becoming so difficult and more volatile. Nature magazine, of all unlikely places, has a good article out this week about the methodological problems with polls. Among other things, the Nature article makes clear that most political polling, both here and in the UK, skew toward the left. Hence the calls for “unskewing” the polls are not fanciful.