Pollsters Promise Adjustments After Missing Again on Trump

It's back to the drawing board for presidential race pollsters. Although closer to the final result this time, the industry underestimated Donald Trump's support for the third straight election. The nation was misled by findings about Vice President Kamala Harris' supposed lead in Iowa, for instance, and Trump's reputed decline among Black voters in Georgia and North Carolina, Politico reports. Her poll released over the weekend "did not match what the Iowa electorate ultimately decided in the voting booth," J. Ann Selzer said in a statement. "I'll be reviewing data from multiple sources with hopes of learning why that happened."

Pollsters tweaked their methods after the 2016 and 2020 elections to try to accurately gauge Trump's support. They realized after Trump's first run that they had missed less educated voters, and many made changes to fix that, with some adjusting based on whom the respondent had voted for in the previous election. That helped some but not enough, per Politico. The most recent New York Times/Sienna College poll showed the race tied in Georgia, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania, for example, all of which Trump won. Anyway, the change based on past votes is just a workaround, experts say. "It's a brute-force correction," one pollster says, when "what we really wanted to do is correct for those non-responders that are Trump voters that otherwise wouldn't participate in anything."

There's a cost to misleading polls. The Iowa one attributed Harris' rise to anger of abortion restrictions and gave Democrats reason to think the new support might help the Democrat carry Michigan and Wisconsin, per the Guardian. "Polling is a very compromised enterprise," a historian posted on X after Iowa was called for Trump on Tuesday night. "It would be great to see people start ignoring it," Rick Perlstein wrote. On the Daily Show, comedian Jon Stewart profanely suggested to pollsters that he's in no hurry for them to decide on their next tweaks. "I don't ever want to ever f---ing hear from you again," he said. (More polls stories.)