Political polls are becoming less and less reliable. The closely-watched recent gubernatorial election in Kentucky provides the latest example. Incumbent Governor Jack Conway was leading Republican Matt Bevin 44% to 41% on October 30 in the average of polls compiled by Real Clear Politics. But 4 days later, on November 3rd, Bevin won 53% to 44%.
Michael Barone is senior Political Analyst for the Washington Examiner. He says that lately, pre-election polls are vastly understating support for right-of-center candidates. And not just in the U.S. It happened in the recent elections in Great Britain and also in Israel and Argentina. But, as recently as 2012, the distortion went in the opposite direction. Democrats’ results were understated. Mitt Romney lost several states where the polls showed him leading.
Michael Barone points out in a Wall Street Journal op ed entitled “Why Political Polls Are Often Wrong,” that polls were very accurate when most households had landlines. That is no longer the case. According to the National Health Interview Study, in 2003 only 2% of Americans lacked a landline telephone. Now 40% don’t have one. And of those who have landlines, many don’t answer them. And people who do answer their phones are less willing than in the past to be interviewed for polls.
If polling companies call cell phones, they must, by law do it manually. No machines doing automatic calls. That gets expensive. Another vehicle for polling is the Internet. But Michael Barone says this “risks producing unrepresentative samples because internet usage is higher among certain groups than others and because Internet respondents are in effect volunteers.”
The Gallup organization, which has been polling for 80 years, won’t conduct presidential polls this election cycle. Pew Research hasn’t been doing them either.
Michael Barone, also a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, says his colleague there who “has been analyzing polls for decades” says we may be seeing “‘the end of polling as we know it.'” Mr. Barone wouldn’t go that far, but says reading political polls is becoming more an art than a science.
Another thing to remember regarding presidential polls is that polls this far away from the election are close to useless in predicting the actual winner. And in this particular election year there’s a huge factor that distorts the polls: celebrity.
Redstate’s Leon Wolf stated the obvious: “…by the time he entered the race, almost no one of voting age in America did not know who Donald Trump was.” He’s the only GOP candidate who cannot say getting more media exposure will help him in the polls. Mr. Wolf points out that as other Republican candidates have been introduced to the public and gotten more exposure many of them have caught up in head-to-head matchups with the likely Democrat nominee, Hillary Clinton. Trump has lost some ground in that regard.
It’s 3 months until the first state votes. An eternity in politics.