PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — Pollsters are being criticized from within their own ranks for coming up short on their predictions about the election. One of the critics is a veteran pollster who says his industry has to do a better job.
“Bad polling is making our entire industry look bad,” said Jim Lee, president of Susquehanna Polling and Research.
He says many of the same errors that plagued polling back in 2016 showed up again this election cycle.
“I have been seeing a disturbing trend of more and more firms releasing polling in various election years, and these polls are showing margins for candidates that are wildly inaccurate and they then have the adverse impact of suppressing the vote,” he said.
Susquehanna was one of the few polling firms that correctly called the presidential race a toss-up in Pennsylvania and several other swing states.
Lee says he believes the future of polling could be in jeopardy if voters lose trust in the process.
“Pennsylvania was a close state with a close outcome and all the firms that had Biden leading by five or more points really need to think internally about how they’re structuring their methodology to make sure they don’t continue to suppress the vote, because that’s what at stake here,” he said.
He blames shoddy methodology for missing the huge number of “shy” Trump supporters that didn’t respond to surveys.
“Obviously, all polling asks who would you vote for if the election were held today and in many of these polls, we’re seeing Biden with leads, and then the very next question will be, who are your neighbors voting for? And in every battleground state, we found Trump winning that question by a 15-point margin, even in states where Biden held a lead on the key horse race question,” Lee said.
He speculates that supporters of President Trump were perhaps being protective of their privacy or afraid of being identified as a Trump supporter, “because the media has made many Trump voters out to be racists and people are reacting to that.”