After 2020, I’m much more wary about polling than I used to be. Pollsters assured us and insisted that they had accounted for “shy Trump voters” or shy GOP voters or working-class whites who were less likely to talk to a stranger on the phone or all kinds of factors, so they wouldn’t have a rerun of 2016. And then last year, despite all those assurances, the majority of pollsters consistently overestimated Democratic performance at the ballot box all over again — particularly egregiously in Senate races in Maine and South Carolina. Earlier this month, five major Democratic pollsters conducted a review and concluded they “saw major errors and failed to live up to our own expectations.” The American Association for Public Opinion Research is conducting a similar review, trying to figure out just what went wrong.
Thus, when a story like this pops up in the Washington Post . . .
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