I wish I knew what Nate Silver’s opinion on Patrick Ruffini’s recent findings on opinion polls was. The short version is that opinion polls overestimated Democratic electoral performance: over the last four cycles, he says 73% of the polls he examined overstated the Democrat, with the effect particularly pronounced in summer polling. Nate has apparently expressed an opinion but, unfortunately, it’s hidden behind a paywall.
Based on my admittedly anecdotal experience canvassing Chicago wards, I think there’s a relatively benign possible explanation at least compared with some of the explanations being offered. I’ve gone door to door in multiple Chicago precincts accompanied by the Republican ward committeeman and my experience has been that Republican households are less likely than Democratic households to answer the door and engage with a canvasser. If a similar difference exists in willingness to respond to pollsters, that alone would introduce a partisan response bias.
The recent Median Strategies debacle raises a related but rather different question: are polls as reliable as they used to be? If you’re not familiar with Median Strategies the organization admittedly published false opinion polls as a “social experiment”. How one might distinguish between a social experiment and political shenanigans is unclear to me. I only pay attention to polls from a small number of outlets: my old client NORC, Gallup, Pew Research, a few others. There’s an enormous amount of disinformation these days.
Be very careful out there.
