Democrats see polls as overestimating Trump's strength
Source: The Hill
03/09/24 6:00 AM ET
Former President Trump led President Biden in a recent national New York Times/Siena College poll by 5 percentage points, prompting a campaign spokesperson for the Democrat to argue polling “consistently overestimates Donald Trump while underestimating Joe Biden.” The remark is emblematic of a deeper skepticism of Trump’s strength in certain Democratic circles.
Biden allies point to primary results this cycle that show Trump underperforming his polling numbers and failing to capture moderate voters, as well as nonpresidential cycles under Biden where Democrats outperformed projections. “We’ve got a long way to go. We’ve got a lot of work to do. But I think everyone in this town … is overestimating their strengths and underestimating ours,” said Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg. Some Democrats were quick to dismiss The New York Times poll in particular.
Strategists were puzzled at the poll’s finding that women were equally split between Trump and Biden at 46 percent each, given exit polls in 2020 found Biden won women by 15 percentage points. Democrats also questioned the poll’s findings that Trump was leading Biden by 6 points among Latino voters because Biden won that group by 33 percentage points in 2020, according to exit polls. Multiple Democratic strategists and pollsters noted 97 percent of interviews with Latinos surveyed for the poll were conducted in English.
Even Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.), who ended his long-shot primary bid against Biden on Wednesday, was skeptical of the poll’s findings. “When the NYT/Sienna poll shows me at 12%, you better believe it is flawed,” he wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter. “Only 5% even know who I am.” The Biden campaign’s belief that Trump is overestimated by polls is largely driven by the fact that voter behavior has not matched projections, including during this year’s primary elections.
Read more: https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4518985-democrats-see-polls-as-overestimating-trumps-strength/
= new reply since forum marked as read
Romney 49%, Obama 48% in Gallup's Final Election Survey
Early voting so far breaks 49% for Obama and 48% for Romney
Gallup Editors
PRINCETON, NJ -- President Barack Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney are within one percentage point of each other in Gallup's final pre-election survey of likely voters, with Romney holding 49% of the vote, and Obama 48%. After removing the 3% of undecided voters from the results and allocating their support proportionally to the two major candidates, Gallup's final allocated estimate of the race is 50% for Romney and 49% for Obama.
The survey was conducted as part of Gallup Daily tracking Nov. 1-4.
(snip)
https://news.gallup.com/poll/158519/romney-obama-gallup-final-election-survey.aspx
And eventually the mea culpa had to happen and they released a final analysis of what went wrong (PDF), their partner USA Today officially dropped them as a partner after that, and Gallup no longer does this poll -
Martha T. Moore
USA TODAY
Published 2:24 p.m. E.T. June 4, 2013 | Updated 5:02 p.m. ET June 4, 2013
WASHINGTON – Pollsters at Gallup said Tuesday they have identified flawed methods that contributed to their incorrect prediction that Mitt Romney would win the 2012 presidential election, but they are still working to determine how to better identify who is likely to vote.
The survey firm undertook a far-reaching review of its operations after its surveys came up short in the election: Gallup's final pre-election estimate showed Romney with 49% support to Obama's 48%, with a margin of error of +/-2%. Most polls estimated Obama would win the popular vote by 1 percentage point. Obama won the popular vote by 3.85 points.
In pre-election polling, Gallup consistently showed Romney with a 3-percentage point lead over Obama. When Gallup switched to surveying only "likely voters," Romney's edge increased to 4 percentage points.
Gallup, with researchers from the University of Michigan, will experiment with ways to better identify likely voters in surveys during the 2013 governor's races in New Jersey and Virginia. Gallup asks seven questions in its phone surveys to determine whether people are likely to vote – a questionnaire that may rely too much on past voting and on how much "thought" voters have given to the election, Gallup Poll editor in chief Frank Newport said. Though all polling outfits showed an increase of support for Romney among likely voters vs. registered voters, Gallup's bump for Romney was the most extreme. "We really are re-evaluating that from square one," Newport said.
(snip)
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2013/06/04/gallup-poll-election-obama-romney/2388921/
And more recently, the 2022 "Red Fizzle" -
https://fortune.com/2022/11/16/pollsters-got-it-wrong-2018-2020-elections-statistical-sophistry-accuracy-sonnenfeld-tian/
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/11/10/21551766/election-polls-results-wrong-david-shor
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-polls-were-mostly-wrong/
https://www.pewresearch.org/methods/2021/04/08/confronting-2016-and-2020-polling-limitations/ - skewed analysis for 2016/2022
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/31/us/politics/polling-election-2022-red-wave.html
https://nul.org/news/why-pundits-and-junk-polls-got-midterm-elections-wrong
https://www.thedailybeast.com/pollsters-have-no-fcking-idea-whats-going-to-happen-during-2022-midterm-elections
https://people.com/politics/why-midterm-polls-falsely-predicted-red-wave/
And a more recent skew - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/sep/24/washington-post-abc-poll-trump-10-points-over-biden
That's pretty much all you need to know.
Pollsters can't robocall cell phones (it's illegal), so they don't get much representation from people whose only phone is their cell phone. Yeah, some people get polls on their cell phones but that's when they've given out their number to other entities who sell their number to pollsters. The great majority of cell phone-only people never get a polling phone call.
A lot of people, when they do agree to answer a poll, don't even finish the poll.
Pollsters need people with time on their hands to respond. That eliminates busy people who are working. Who has a lot of time? Older people (who tend to be conservative), people who don't need to work.
And then there are biased questions that pigeonhole answers the pollsters want. When faced with a loaded question, people often pick the less onerous answer although it does not represent how they feel, just because they feel they have to pick one.
Some polls use a tiny polling population, and those results have a ton of error. A small group isn't representative.
There are a LOT of reasons why polls have not been accurately predictive for a long time.
The much better predictor: look at the actual recent election results. According to polls, Democrats consistently "overperform." Republicans consistently do much worse than predicted.
So take polls with a grain of salt. Look at the polling entity. Some are very biased, like Rasmussen. They lean so far to the right it tilts the earth. Look at the sample size. Look at the way the questions are phrased. Or if you don't feel like doing all that work, just ignore polls. I do. 
and have been trying to over-correct ever since. Literally dismissing every other demographic except the so-called "rural/white working class" and oversampling them. And when called on it, they claim they "correct to the numbers in the population", which is a big fail as well.
There were a couple huge threads around the 2022 election and perfect examples in 2023 -
https://www.democraticunderground.com/100218254030
https://www.democraticunderground.com/100218253358
That CNN had the push-poll questions (I had grabbed a snapshot of some) -
And they even tracked how well the propaganda was going with that -
I think they even asked "Hunter Biden" questions as well - keeping the narrative going.
Other than results from "exit polls" that might better reflect "reality", the main takeaway is this -
