FiveThirtyEight founder and Editor-in-Chief Nate Silver is defending the 2020 cycle’s political polling despite misses nationally and on the state level.
In an article posted to his website on Wednesday, Silver said, “Voters and the media need to recalibrate their expectations around polls — not necessarily because anything’s changed, but because those expectations demanded an unrealistic level of precision — while simultaneously resisting the urge to ‘throw all the polls out.'”
The 2020 polls have come under fire for their predictions in many areas that underestimated the performance of President Trump as well as down-ballot Republicans, including in the House. The polls in the final weeks of the election showed President-elect Joe Biden winning Florida by 3 to 6 percentage points. Trump ended up winning the state by 3.4 percentage points, according to RealClearPolitics.
Polls in Wisconsin showed Biden winning the state by a margin of about 5 to 8 percentage points. Biden won the state by less than 1 point, according to Real Clear Politics.
Nationally, the former vice president was predicted to win the national popular vote by about 5 to 10 percentage points. RealClearPolitics reported that Biden has a 3.4-point national advantage, but that is expected to grow as more ballots are counted.
“This year was definitely a little weird, given that the vote share margins were often fairly far off from the polls (including in some high-profile examples such as Wisconsin and Florida),” Silver said. “But at the same time, a high percentage of states (likely 48 out of 50) were ‘called’ correctly, as was the overall Electoral College and popular vote winner (Biden).”
Silver argued that while the polls were off this year and may have been a bit more off than in 2016, the errors were still “well within the realm of historical precedent.”
Silver said polls are always wrong to a certain degree. In 2012, for example, pollsters underestimated the performance of former President Barack Obama.
“Say the final polling averages miss by a bit more than 3 points on average, as our forecast assumes,” he added. “That means the margin of error is closer to 7 or 8 points. And every presidential election so far this century has fallen within that range. So if you’re coming to the polls for strong probabilistic hints of what is going to happen, they can provide those — and the hints will usually lead you in roughly the right direction, as they did this year. But if you’re looking for certainty, you’ll have to look elsewhere.”
Although the race has been called by multiple media outlets for Biden, the Trump campaign insists that widespread voter fraud has prevented Trump from being declared the victor.
