It’s harder than ever to be an informed reader of election polls.
Methodologies have shifted rapidly — including new efforts to reach the previously hard-to-reach, potentially decisive sliver of former President Donald Trump’s coalition — and polling has changed significantly even from just four years ago.
And the way we think about it needs to change, too.
So here, on the eve of the election year, is your guide to the chaotic polling year ahead: a list of things every knowledgeable and interested political observer should look for. These will help you know which 2024 polls to pay attention to, which to ignore, and to which you should apply a healthy measure of skepticism. And readers (and social media posters, especially) should also know what the poll results actually mean, and what they don’t.
Some core principles remain the same, like paying attention to who commissioned a poll and its margin of error. But being an informed reader of the polls requires even more now. That includes taking note — and demanding greater disclosure about — how poll respondents were interviewed and selected to participate in the first place. And in our polarized country in which hyper-consequential elections come down to narrow margins, what does it really mean for one candidate to be “leading?”
It’s not even 2024, but the debates over the polling between Trump and President Joe Biden have already started. So here’s what to know to read the polls — and what you deserve to know from pollsters:
Pollsters changing how they interview people
Just four years ago, almost all of the 2020 election polls were conducted through either telephone calls or online interviews.
Now, pollsters aren’t just embracing new methodologies — they’re mixing methods within individual polls to cobble together representative samples.
While some polls still exclusively use one methodology, many combine phone interviews with web-based approaches, whether respondents are contacted by text, email, are existing members of an internet panel or complete the survey after clicking on an ad on another website.
CNN’s most recent poll was conducted via a mix of phone calls and online interviews with respondents selected by mail (more on this below). The Wall Street Journal’s most recent poll combined phone interviews with........