![]() The unit takes every state into account, even those that aren't considered crucial for victory, to be ready for the unknown. Trump could win if he took the Rust Belt states - a scenario that then played out. Khanna said races in battleground states began to tighten as the 2016 election came to a close, prompting the CBS News polling unit to envision a scenario where Mr. "Unfortunately you kind of have to vet the polls as well," Coleman said.ĬBS News has always weighted for education, according to Kabir Khanna, CBS News' senior manager of election analytics. AAPOR recommended "well-resourced survey organizations" to collectively finance "high quality state-level polls so as to reduce the likelihood of another black eye for the profession." With shrinking budgets at news outlets to finance polling, there is no reason to believe that this problem is going to fix itself," reads the evaluation. "Errors in state polls like those observed in 2016 are not uncommon. In its 2016 evaluation, AAPOR wrote that state-level polling is "often under-budgeted." Polling in battleground states, however, is often left up to small institutions or universities that cannot easily adapt. "(Pollsters) are not going to let that happen again," he said of the 2020 election. Keeter said the polling profession recognizes that education has "become a schism in our contemporary politics," and needs to be represented for accurate polls. He said "the biggest lesson, especially in the Trump era, is educational attainment as a predictor of people's voting habits." Miles Coleman, associate editor of Sabato's Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia's Center for Politics, the 2016 election showed that accounting for education is now as important as race and gender for conducting an accurate poll. "That hurt, whereas it hadn't really hurt in years prior," Dutwin said. Never before has education level so explicitly swayed an election. "Many polls – especially at the state level – did not adjust their weights to correct for the over-representation of college graduates in their surveys, and the result was over-estimation of support for Clinton." "Recent studies are clear that people with more formal education are significantly more likely to participate in surveys than those with less education," according to the evaluation. It also found that surveys were skewed just by who answered the phone. Voters with higher education levels were more likely to support Clinton," according to AAPOR's Evaluation of 2016 Election Polls. "In 2016 there was a strong correlation between education and presidential vote in key states. Trump also won among White, non-college-educated women 62 to 34%. Trump - he beat Clinton in that group by the enormous margin of 72 to 23%. Pollsters were unprepared for White male non-college educated voters to turn out in droves for Mr. But census data can only go so far, Dutwin said, and isn't adept at accounting for likely voters. Pollsters weight for characteristics such as age, race, or gender to make sure that their polling sample matches up with census data for those groups in that area. The American Association for Public Opinion Research, AAPOR, defines weighting as "an attempt to ensure that the sample more accurately reflects the characteristics of the population from which it was drawn and to which an inference will be made," noting that "it does not involve any changes to the actual answers to survey questions." Weighting, a standard polling practice, is a process that gives more statistical value to groups pollsters know are being underrepresented in surveys. Trump's significant support from non-college-educated White males. Trump, whereas he won by more than two-to-one (64% to 28%) among white voters who had not completed college.ĭavid Dutwin, chief scientist of survey panel AmeriSpeak at NORC at the University of Chicago, said most 2016 polls were not weighted by education, and therefore missed Mr. Only 38% of college-educated Whites said they voted for Mr. One of the key issues with 2016 polling was that much of it didn't account for a person's education.Īn examination of the 2016 electorate by Pew found that Whites with a four-year college degree or more education made up 30% of all validated voters, while White voters who had not completed college made up 44%.
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