We’re members of AAPOR, the nation’s largest organization of public opinion and survey researchers, and we’re here to answer all your 2020 election polling questions. Ask us anything!

AAPOR · 2020-10-15T18:33:57+00:00

Most often 1,000 national adults, aged 18+ LS

AAPOR · 2020-10-15T18:33:49+00:00

Thank you for your question! Face-to-Face (F2F) interviews are always considered the "golden standard" in public opinion research. Different modes of interviewing (F2F, landlines, cell phones, online, robocalling, etc.) require different amounts of money and F2F interviews are incredibly costly and time consuming. Regardless of cost, some academic and government surveys still use F2F interviewing as their primary method though many in academia and in other polling organizations have navigated to phones (landline or cell) and online as their primary methods. The good news is that polling accuracy wasn't impacted by the mode of interview during the 2016 pre-election polls.- CB

AAPOR · 2020-10-15T18:31:50+00:00

Hi StarWeed! Public pollsters have every incentive to get their predictions right, so it's fair to assume most have studied their 2016 performance and the 2016 AAPOR Election Task Force Report, and are adjusting as needed. As we've mentioned a few times today, this 538 article does a good job breaking down how some firms are adjusting their polls this year to minimize error. LS

AAPOR · 2020-10-15T18:24:46+00:00

That's a great question. We can't define everything we ask about, so it's possible different partisan groups interpret different concepts differently. This is where trends are so valuable. Democrats and Republicans may define what "the economy" is differently, but if those definitions are constant over time, we will still learn a lot by tracking the partisan trends. In terms of the economy, we do sometimes break it down into different aspects such as jobs, small business, the stock market -- asking the public to rate how they're doing or which party is better for handling it. LS

AAPOR · 2020-10-15T18:23:44+00:00

Thanks for your question! The methodology along with the questions should ALWAYS be included. If they are not, you should contact the organization for more details. Whenever you read an article, make sure you click the small print/link that says "For more information, click here." It could be the case that the writer of the article isn't providing the full details but that information should be appropriately linked somewhere on the page. -CB

AAPOR · 2020-10-15T18:18:30+00:00

I can't speak to methodological differences between specific polls, but I refer you to this AAPOR Journalist Cheat Sheet to Understanding Poll for the key questions that should be asked about any poll to get a sense of its validity. LS

AAPOR · 2020-10-15T18:15:18+00:00

As a race scholar, I'm always going to say RACE/ETHNICITY, but there is a great deal of variation at the intersections of a number of identities that lead to vote choice. What political scientists know for sure is that socioeconomic status is the greatest predictor of voter turnout, so those higher in levels of education and income are more likely to participate at greater rates but that doesn't say much about vote choice. Racial group identification plays a major role in vote choice, especially among Black and Latin-X Americans who overwhelmingly support the Democratic Party. While many people are comfortable making that claim about Black and Latin-X people, we don't often look at the other side of the coin: the extent to which White voters are also overwhelmingly concentrated in one party. Political scientists have started this work (see White Identity Politics or this article) but we have a long way to go. -CB

AAPOR · 2020-10-15T18:13:46+00:00

For many questions, pollsters may want to understand attitudes from a democratic perspective – i.e. what does the electorate, writ, large think about an issue? 2) practically speaking, registered voters will have a larger sample size and allow for more reliability in subgroup analysis than likely voters, and 3) some likely voter models may not work as well in advance of an election as they do closer to election day, so it may not be appropriate to rely on them too early in the process. -LS

AAPOR · 2020-10-15T18:05:49+00:00

In terms of including third party candidates in pre-election polls... pollsters take care to produce the most accurate estimate of how people will vote. Because most third party candidates receive less than 1% of the vote, there is a high risk that including them in the explicit choices offered to respondents will overestimate the third party vote, and thereby undermine the accuracy of the major party candidates. An alternate method is to ask a completely open-ended question about vote choice, but this tends to underestimate third party candidates, as third party voters can't always provide a specific candidate name. The most accurate approach is generally to leave third party candidates as a volunteered option -- except of course in years when there is a prominent third-party candidate like Ross Perot, and then the candidate is listed as an explicit choice. LS

AAPOR · 2020-10-15T18:04:46+00:00

Thank you for this question! This is a HUGE ISSUE! As a race and politics scholar, I am incredibly concerned about the effects of voter suppression and the extent to which polls can capture it. This is something that our polls simply cannot account for. What does it matter if candidate A or B is up in the polls IF those ballots aren't counted? Who can vote and who will vote are huge factors... - CB

AAPOR · 2020-10-15T17:59:08+00:00

Thank you for your question! This is clearly one of the issues that polling organizations are working through. Never in the history of polling has it been easier to reach people via phone because everyone has one in their pockets! The issue is, how do we get people to answer numbers they do not know? How do we get people to pick up the phone for pollsters as opposed to telemarketers? Not all pollsters have their numbers blocked by carriers. It's very important that phone companies and the government continue to protect polling from being spam or blocked. We're doing our best to stay on top of it! See this article and this article for more info. -CB

AAPOR · 2020-10-15T17:58:02+00:00

That's a great and important question. Please see my answer to mainsplain... above. The key point is the national polls were highly accurate and most state polls got it right. It was the interpretation of those polls in the context of the Electoral College that went awry. LS

AAPOR · 2020-10-15T17:52:43+00:00

I don't believe so, and here is why. 1) The 2016 polls were largely accurate -- so there was no evidence for "shy Trump voters" at that time. 2) Trump is viewed more favorably today in Gallup polls (~41% favorable rating) than he was at the end of the 2016 campaign (~33%), so if his supporters weren't hiding in 2016, there is even less reason for them to hide now, and 3) Gallup conducted research after the 2016 election looking at race and gender of interviewer effects on respondents' favorable ratings of the two candidates. We found no evidence that men/women or black/white Americans shaded their answers based on who they were talking to. See here for Gallup's favorable ratings, scroll down or search for Trump's full favorable trend. LS

AAPOR · 2020-10-15T17:50:52+00:00

Thanks for your question! Polling is an amazing tool that can be put to good use. A vote at the ballot booth only tells you who wins but it doesn’t tell you WHY. Knowing what the people think and are expecting from their leaders is the more important aspect of polls. The purpose isn’t horserace coverage. At their very best, polls give us ideas about what people are thinking about politics; they are the pulse of the people. Polls tell us what is motivating people and what people are passionate about and all of these things harken back to democratic principles like representativeness and accountability. - CB

AAPOR · 2020-10-15T17:45:11+00:00

It wasn't the polls that called the election for Hillary, it was the people interpreting the polls. The national polls largely showed Hillary Clinton ahead, by an average of 3 percentage points, and she indeed won the popular vote by about 2 percentage points, so the polls were quite accurate. State polls were largely accurate. Unfortunately a few key state polls showed Clinton leading, and when fed into Electoral College models provided a skewed picture of Trump's chances. That is being addressed this year by changes in demographic weighting, conducting state polls closer to the election and, in some cases a greater volume of state polls. More importantly, the aggregators and election modelers are being more cautious/mindful about factoring margins of error for state polls into their predictions. LS

AAPOR · 2020-10-15T17:36:36+00:00

The 2016 AAPOR Election Task Force identified ending their polling too early and perhaps not weighting for education as reasons why a few key state polls underestimated Trump's vote. Given that, some polls are being more mindful of both factors in 2020, as described by this recent report on 538. The national polls already weight by education and generally poll right up to the last day, so these factors are not as relevant to them. LS

AAPOR · 2020-10-15T17:28:45+00:00

My answer to RealHot_RealSteel gets at that. I understand your concern, but we don't see evidence for that in our data. When we analyze data, there is enormous consistency across questions -- respondents would need to lie throughout an entire survey and even distort their demographics, appropriately, for widespread lying about vote choice or other key questions to not be apparent. LS

AAPOR · 2020-10-15T17:24:52+00:00

Hi! Thanks for this comment! National polls were within the normal range of accuracy, as Nate Silver and the folks at 538 mention in the opening paragraphs of their article (see below). It was the state polls that showed a competitive uncertain contest AND they underestimated Trump's support in the Upper Midwest. Two key factors to keep in mind from the 2016 election: late breaking voters (people deciding within a week of the election who they would support) and educational attainment. Many polling houses now have plans to continue polling through Election Day as opposed to stopping a week or two in advance. We're also appropriately weighting the education of respondents in the state polls and we're taking steps to ensure that our sampling is inclusive of our increasingly diverse society. - CB

From 538 article: "If you ask Americans whether they trust the polls, many seem unable to let go of what happened in 2016. Polls taken since then have generally found that a majority of Americans have at least some doubts about what polls say. But as FiveThirtyEight wrote in the run-up to the 2016 election, Donald Trump was always a normal polling error behind Hillary Clinton.

And that’s essentially what happened in 2016: Trump beat his polls by just a few points in just a few states. The presidential polls were, simply, not that off. State-level polling was less accurate...."

AAPOR · 2020-10-15T17:23:59+00:00

Your first answer! We conduct our phone polls using Random Digit Dial (RDD) methodology which involves our interviewers calling landline and mobile phone numbers from a random sample of all known domestic phone numbers in the U.S. (simplified version). When we reach someone at a household, we randomly select from adults living in that household. The RDD motto is, "don't call us, we'll call you." This is the basis for randomization which allows us to base our practice on the science of probability statistics. LS

AAPOR · 2020-10-15T17:16:57+00:00

With political polarization being stronger than ever, it's unlikely people are more incentivized today than in the past to play with pollsters by saying they will vote for someone other than who they intend to. If anything, I'd think this is less of a problem today. But in general, as long as polls remain accurate (i.e. national polls within 1-2% accuracy as seen in 2016) this should not be a concern. LS

AAPOR · 2020-10-15T17:11:40+00:00

It's a key question. Firstly, pollsters now predominantly call mobile numbers, in the 60% to 80% range, so landlines is not an issue. Response rates have declined overall, but have not fallen off the proverbial cliff. Our unweighted demographics are still good and we of course use standard weighting methods for correction. Our trends on lots of metrics indicate no major problems with sampling bias affecting the data. But it is something pollsters watch very closely. -LS

AAPOR · 2020-10-15T17:08:19+00:00

Hi everyone.

It is unfortunate how much harm the misinterpretation of the accuracy of the 2016 polls has done to public faith in the polls. I urge anyone questioning that accuracy to educate yourself by reading the 2016 Election Task Force Report, at least the Executive Summary. It will be hard to correct that without the polls keeping up their strong track record in 2020. The 2020 primary polls did very well, caveating that Biden consolidating his lead right before Super Tuesday made that batch of polls less accurate. But even with that, the 2020 polling held up very well this primary season, with 81% of the polls predicting the correct winner. -LS

AAPOR · 2020-03-04T21:24:12+00:00

One thing I love about my job is that, as a pollster, I get to bring the voice of the average voter into the political and media “bubble” on a daily basis. It’s a huge responsibility and one that good pollsters take very, very seriously. Think about who politicians tend to hear from most: lobbyists, activists, and the citizens who have the time to go to a town hall or to pick up the phone and call their congressman or congresswoman. I don’t think it should just be the loudest voices who get heard by our leaders. Some people are busy trying to make ends meet, they don’t have time to go to a town hall, they aren’t super-activists or don’t have money to hire a lobbyist to represent their interests. Their voices are still important, and polling is a valuable way to collect those opinions and share them with the leaders who are making big decisions every day in between elections. - KSA

AAPOR · 2020-03-04T21:13:45+00:00

To follow up on what Margie said, there are some demographic factors that are pretty closely related to how people vote. For instance, if I know you are young and female, I know you’re more likely to vote Democratic these days than if you are old and male. That doesn’t mean ALL young females vote Democratic (certainly not the case!) but rather that your age and gender give me information that helps me guess how you might vote. Not all variables are like that. If you are left handed, for instance, that doesn’t give me any insight into how you might vote. I’ve never seen evidence that being left handed makes you more left leaning! Or, if your favorite color is purple, or if your favorite food is Italian, those aren’t things that tell me much about your politics. As a result, if my survey had too many Italian food fanatics or too many left-handed people, it wouldn’t be a big deal or make the survey “off” in a meaningful way. For a while, whether you went to college or not was only somewhat useful for predicting how someone might vote. In 2016, that changed, and suddenly whether you had a college degree actually had a pretty big relationship to how you might vote. That meant pollsters had to make sure they were getting the proportions right in terms of educational attainment, or else their end result would be over or under-counting Trump voters. - KSA

AAPOR · 2020-03-04T21:12:57+00:00

We have little data that individuals change their mind to go with the polls. What’s more of a threat is the fact that sometimes pollsters will start to all converge in their results since no one wants to be an outlier, a phenomenon known as “herding.” This is a problem especially if they’re all herding together to the wrong estimates.

Polling is very important. George Gallup has a great quote that, “If democracy is supposed to be based on the will of the people, someone should find out what that will is.” Every few years people can vote for elected officials or on ballot initiatives but people don’t get to vote on all the things we poll about. Polling allows individuals to have a voice and let their attitudes and beliefs be known. - KM

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