Anxiety about the 2024 election is high. Both sides know that their candidate might<\/em> lose \u2014 and they want polls to tell them just how scared to be.<\/p>\n

Right now, polls give us the clearest answers to those questions. But there\u2019s a problem: Every year, polling gets tougher. We pollsters face three core challenges that threaten the accuracy of all<\/em> political surveys. Nobody has solved them, and it\u2019s not clear anyone can.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s what we\u2019re up against:<\/p>\n

Challenge #1: Almost nobody wants to talk to pollsters \u2014 and those who do might be weirdos.\u00a0<\/strong><\/h2>\n
Polling is built on a simple idea: If we talk to a representative, miniature version of a state or country, we can estimate what the whole state or country thinks. It\u2019s like getting a sample at an ice cream shop: one well-mixed spoonful tells you what a whole cone will taste like.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Nonresponse makes good data rare and expensive. <\/p>\n
But it\u2019s getting tougher to reach the people needed to build that mini-country or mini-state. Response rates \u2014 how often people are willing to pick up a cold call or answer a text from us \u2014 have been dropping for decades.\u00a0The response rates for Pew Research Center\u2019s telephone surveys plunged from 36% in 1997 to 6% in 2018<\/a>. Nate Cohn of The New York Times reported a 0.4%<\/a> response rate to his polls in 2022. And any pollster will tell you response rates are low this year as well.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Nonresponse makes good data rare and expensive. Polls are costly, in part, because we spend so much money sending out unanswered texts or making calls that get sent straight to voicemail. And as polls get more expensive, media organizations will either sponsor fewer surveys or opt for polls that reduce costs by cutting corners.<\/p>\n
But even when a group can afford to field a poll, nonresponse creates huge potential data problems.\u00a0<\/p>\n
When only 1 out of 100 people take a poll, pollsters have to make statistical adjustments.\u00a0Some \u2014 such as getting the right demographic mix \u2014 are easy. If a pollster just can\u2019t reach enough Latino, working class, young or rural voters, they often give the underrepresented voters they did <\/em>contact a little more weight in their calculations. Weighted polls give each demographic a more accurate amount of say, even though some groups were harder to contact.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Other adjustments are not so easy. <\/p>\n
Suppose a pollster has the right demographic mix in their poll but<\/em> mostly happens to interview, for lack of a better description, nerdy rule-followers. This pollster might miss cranky, anti-establishment Trump voters \u2014 and risk undercounting the Trump vote for the third election straight.\u00a0<\/p>\n
It\u2019s almost impossible to directly adjust for this type of issue. The census helps us calculate how many 18- to 34-year-olds should be in a poll, but not how many cranks and nerds. So pollsters have to get creative with math \u2014 which leads to another issue.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Challenge #2: We have to model our way around the fact that nobody talks to us. That\u2019s risky.\u00a0<\/strong><\/h2>\n
The most common response to this problem \u2014 a shortage of pro-Trump, anti-institution Republicans in the 2020 polls \u2014 is weighting by \u201crecalled vote.\u201d Essentially, pollsters ask people how they voted in 2020 and try to get the right number of Trump and Biden voters in their sample.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Everyone is using math to adjust for the sad fact that normal people don\u2019t take surveys.<\/p>\n
Though I\u2019ve used this tactic in some polls, there are downsides. Respondents don\u2019t always correctly recall whom they voted for. Every estimate of how many Trump or Biden voters will vote again in 2024 is just that \u2014 an estimate. The list goes on<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n
That being said, many reputable pollsters say<\/a> that weighting by recalled vote<\/a> improved the accuracy of past surveys<\/a>. And pollsters that only weight by party \u2014 and not recalled vote \u2014 might fail to fully address problems that damaged the industry\u2019s credibility four years ago.\u00a0<\/p>\n
There\u2019s no right answer. Everyone is using math to adjust for the sad fact that normal people don\u2019t take surveys. And every pollster is on edge because, if we make the smallest mistake, we\u2019ll be punished for years.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Challenge #3: Elections are closer than ever, so \u201cthe polls\u201d will almost certainly be \u201cwrong.\u201d\u00a0<\/strong><\/h2>\n
The last true blowout presidential win was Ronald Reagan\u2019s 1984 re-election. The last 40 years have seen the most consistently competitive presidential races in living memory. That\u2019s bad news for polls \u2014 which are blunt instruments rather than precision predictors.\u00a0<\/p>\n
When a pollster randomly samples the electorate, they can \u2014 through no fault of their own \u2014 accidentally pick up a few too many voters from one side or the other. When we try to poll an upcoming election, we\u2019re making (fallible) projections about who will and won\u2019t turn out. And there\u2019s plenty more uncertainty \u2014 from nonresponse, decisions around weighting and more \u2014 that\u2019s just not easy to communicate to the lay reader.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In a race this tight, in which survey after survey has Harris and Trump dead even in the swing states, a good pollster could do everything right, yet still miss the result by a point or two and face years of ridicule from a huge audience of readers.<\/p>\n
But we pollsters can\u2019t look at these problems, yell \u201cit\u2019s not fair!\u201d and go home. I\u2019ve built election<\/a> forecast<\/a> models, and I\u2019ve seen firsthand that polls are\u00a0the best tool for predicting elections. More importantly, they\u2019re the only<\/em> way to ask members of the public what they think on any question, in real time.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The problems with polling are real. Maybe at some point, nonresponse or some other issue will become unsolvable and cause a catastrophic, industrywide collapse. But unless that happens, we\u2019ll need to keep polling, because nothing else quite does what polls do.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\n
<\/span>David Byler<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n
David Byler is chief of research at Noble Predictive Insights, a non-partisan polling firm anchored in the Southwest. He was previously a data columnist for the Washington Post.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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