Michael Barone
“I like a good contrarian argument as much as the next guy,” tweets Real Clear Politics analyst Sean Trende, “but there’s really no getting around the fact that the 2020 polling was a pile of steaming garbage.”
“The national polls were even worse than they were four years ago,” writes New York Times polling guru Nate Cohn. “Whatever steps pollsters took to improving after 2016 were cancelled out by a new set of problems.”
Trende and Cohn have earned credibility as two of the few political analysts who spotted, before Donald Trump’s surprise victory of 2016, that white non-college graduates were underrepresented in media and exit polls, and that their potential for trending Republican was overlooked. This year, pollsters adjusted their samples to include accurate proportions of non-college whites, but the responses from these groups proved misleading.
The result: polls significantly overstated Joe Biden’s popular vote margin nationally, and consistently showed Donald Trump and Republican candidates running worse in target states than they ended up doing. The errors were largest in the states most frequently polled.
Why the error? The left-wing analyst David Shor argues that Democrats, locked down in their home offices by Covid, were more eager to respond to polls, just as they were more likely than in the past to donate money to Democrats and tweet their loathing of the Republican president. There’s probably something to that. The Pew Research Center finds that fewer than one out of ten people contacted actually responds to polls, and if one party’s fans do so more often the results will be skewed.
But if some types of voters tend to be overpolled others tend to be underpolled. Who are they? Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini’s chart comparing pre-election polling and the APVoteCast exits identifies white college graduates, women as well as men, as voting much more Republican than indicated in pre-election polling.
National Journal’s Josh Kraushaar showed how this produced systemically erroneous results in House races. Both public and partisan polls showed Democrats gaining seats. Instead Republicans gained 6 to 13. As Kraushaar recounts, Democrats failed to capture the high-education districts they targeted and lost several such districts they had captured in 2018. House polls haven’t been so far off results since at least 1994.
The hidden Republican trend may be due to what two Republican consultants derived from extensive interviews with suburban voters over six months. They told Kraushaar that respondents complained about “the excesses of so-called ‘cancel culture,’ pointing to a stifling environment where employees worry they can be fired or punished for heterodox political views expressed at the workplace.” Such voters evidently hesitated before voicing career-ending or friendship-breaking views to callers who may have their names or addresses.
Kraushaar also cites Eric Kaufmann, a London-based Canadian political scientist of Jewish, Chinese and Latino ancestry, whose 2019 book Whiteshift puts today’s ethnic and racial changes in historic perspective. “Republican supporters with degrees tend to work in graduate-dominated environments, where organisations and peers are more likely to enforce norms of political correctness,” Kaufmann writes in the British online magazine UnHerd, “As a result, it is highly-educated Republican supporters who are most shy about revealing their beliefs at work.”
He cites polling showing that twice as many Republican as Democratic college grads “said they feared that their careers could be at risk if their views became known.” This is a case of political speech being suppressed out of fear, and it's not the only such example. Just as it is out of date to lament that big-money Republicans are buying elections, now that Democrats routinely outspend their opponents by vast margins, so it is out of date to suppose that the greatest threats to free expression come from conservatives trying to stamp out obscenity.
The greatest threat to free speech today comes from the Left -- from college and university campuses with their speech codes. From the social media giants where 23-year-old college graduates suppress speech as “fake” or while accurate may be (in a Biden press aide’s term) “misleading.” From the corporate human resources bureaucrats who discipline and fire employees whose choice of words makes anyone else “uncomfortable.”
When I was in the polling business some four decades ago, I came to believe that one measure of a free society is that polls are accurate because people aren’t afraid to say what they really think. This year’s “steaming garbage” polls suggest that many Americans aren’t confident they live in such a society anymore. Pollsters will keep trying to improve their techniques, but if large numbers of Americans are afraid to speak freely, they won’t ever entirely succeed.
Examiner