PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — As the dust settled after last week’s midterms, polling for this election cycle appeared close to the mark.
According to Chris Borick, director of the Lehigh University Opinion Observatory and political science professor, pollsters work hard to be accurate but can’t predict the future the way some people expect.
“They can help us understand the dynamics that are going on in a broad way,” Borick explained. “But we often affix incredible precision and power to them that they simply don’t have.”
He said that polls are not a crystal ball, but are instead snapshots in time that provide useful information about public perceptions.
According to Borick, it has become especially difficult to use these snapshots to build an understanding of the attitudes of Republicans and MAGA supporters. He says they have become increasingly unwilling to participate — a behavior influenced by President Trump’s remarks lashing out at political polls.
“The president has his own gravity, and it tends to, I think, change everything, including polling in some ways,” he said.
As a result, pollsters had to weight what responses they did get to make sure those views were shown in proportion, though Borick said that’s nothing new: Democratic voters were similarly undersampled in the 2012 presidential election.
This year, because of adjustments made to make up for undersampling, Democrats ended up outperforming in the elections from what pollsters predicted based on information they gathered.
The director of the Lehigh University Opinion Observatory said that pollsters work hard to provide accuracy, but can’t precisely predict the future
The director of the Lehigh University Opinion Observatory said that pollsters work hard to provide accuracy, but can’t precisely predict the future
