Really good article on polling in the election by 538
Quote:
Here are a few of them:
On the one hand, I don’t entirely understand the polls-were-wrong storyline. This year was definitely a little weird, given that the vote share margins were often fairly far off from the polls (including in some high-profile examples such as Wisconsin and Florida). But at the same time, a high percentage of states (likely 48 out of 50) were “called” correctly, as was the overall Electoral College and popular vote winner (Biden). And that’s usually how polls are judged: Did they identify the right winner?
On the other hand, evaluating how close the polls came to the actual vote share margins is a better way to judge polls, so I’m glad that people are doing that.
And yet, the margins by which the polls missed — underestimating President Trump by what will likely end up being 3 to 4 percentage points in national and swing state polls — is actually pretty normal by historical standards.
However, there are nevertheless reasons to be concerned about the polls going forward, especially if it’s hard to get a truly representative sample of people on the phone.
Finally, there’s a slightly meta point here: Voters and the media need to recalibrate their expectations around polls — not necessarily because anything’s changed, but because those expectations demanded an unrealistic level of precision — while simultaneously resisting the urge to “throw all the polls out.”
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https://fivethirtyeight.com/features...pretty-normal/
I really like the last bullet. We are asking poles to be more representative then they can be.