Are polls misleading Americans?

**Anthony Zurcher** (0:00)
All right, Sumi, we are about two months away from the midterm congressional elections. Everyone is looking about who might win, who might lose. They're looking up polls in particular, and what polls might be telling us about the chances for Democrats to wrest back control of Congress.

**Sumi Somaskanda** (0:14)
Yeah, everyone is trying to read the tea leaves by looking at these polls. And if you look at them right now, they indicate that Democrats are leading in a lot of these races, that they have a good chance to win back the House of Representatives, maybe even an outside chance to take the Senate back as well.
But we have to keep in mind that polling is not an exact science, and they give us a snapshot, an idea of where things are heading, but we cannot definitively say what they're telling us. And of late, there have been a few polls that have not been spot on.

**Anthony Zurcher** (0:44)
Yeah, I think people will think about 2016 and the polls indicating that Hillary Clinton might have an edge going into that race against Donald Trump. But 2020, when the polls suggested that Joe Biden was going to comfortably win the presidential race, and it ended up being a lot closer than we thought. So all of this has people wondering, are polls still accurate? What's wrong with them? Are the polls that we have seen in recent races and primaries this year that have been pretty remarkably off, is that a sign of things to come?

**Sumi Somaskanda** (1:14)
So as polling season, Anthony gets underway, we're gonna, in this episode, give you all you need to know when you hear broadcasters like myself shouting numbers at you.

**Anthony Zurcher** (1:24)
Welcome to Americast.

**Stephen Hawkins** (1:28)
Americast from BBC News.

**SPEAKER_4** (1:31)
You hear that sound?

**Anthony Zurcher** (1:32)
Oh, I think when I hear that sound, it reminds me of money.

**SPEAKER_5** (1:36)
We didn't start this war, but under President Trump, we are finishing it. This is a big coverup, and this administration is engaged in it.

**SPEAKER_4** (1:43)
This guy has Trump derangement syndrome.

**Anthony Zurcher** (1:45)
I have four words for you.

**Sumi Somaskanda** (1:55)
Hello, this is Sumi in Washington DC.

**Anthony Zurcher** (1:58)
It's Anthony here with Sumi in Washington and BBC Bureau.

**Sumi Somaskanda** (2:01)
Anthony, we're actually going to have a pollster on in a moment, who will pull back the curtains on the mysterious world of polling. But explain why we're talking about this right now, Anthony, why we're taking a closer look at the process behind polling and the numbers that we're seeing.

**Anthony Zurcher** (2:16)
Well, one of the big reasons is that there have been some pretty remarkable polling misses so far this primary election season. One in Michigan where Abdul El-Sayed, the progressive candidate for the Democratic nomination for Senate, looked like he had a big lead. And then when it came down to election day, he only won by a few percentage points over Haley Stevens, the congresswoman from Michigan. And people started to wonder why were the polls off on this? And then just a week later in Wisconsin, there was an expectation that Francesca Hong would win the Democratic governor's nomination. She was a Democratic socialist. In fact, so much so that Mandela Barnes, one of the rivals of hers, dropped out saying that she was going to win. And then it turns out she didn't win.
And a different candidate, David Crowley, ended up pulling it off. So there's a couple of instances now where we've seen polling tell us one thing, and either the results are a lot closer than we expected, or they were just flat out wrong. So that has people second-guessing themselves. That has raised all of these concerns we discussed about whether polling is accurate or not dating back over a decade.
And we need to figure out what can polls tell us, and what can't they tell us?

**Sumi Somaskanda** (3:29)
Yeah, that has all given me a deep sense of unease looking ahead to the midterms. And to put our worries to rest, we have our pollster with us, Stephen Hawkins, Global Director of Research at the Pollster, More in Common. Stephen, thanks for joining us.

**Stephen Hawkins** (3:42)
Pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.

**Sumi Somaskanda** (3:44)
So what is going on?

**Stephen Hawkins** (3:46)
Great question. Well, let's contextualize this by focusing on the type of elections that we're talking about here, which are primary elections, not general elections. And that creates a whole bunch of uncertainty that makes it much harder to predict what's going to happen. So what you do with a poll is you have to first decide who do we think is going to vote, and then you have to go find them and talk to them and ask them who they're going to vote for, and then you make a prediction about what's going to happen. Now that is much, much harder in a primary election because you're talking about a small percent of the population. You're talking about maybe 15% of the population. And it's highly variable between cycles. So I was just speaking this week with somebody who was doing get out the vote efforts in Georgia and Texas, and she was saying that her efforts were yielding between a 50% and a 138% increase in voter turnout in the specific areas where she was working. Now that's a huge amount of variability that pollsters are going to have a hard time accounting for. The other thing that's happening with primary elections as opposed to general elections is people are making decisions in the last few days or even the day of the election. Historically, we know that between 30 and 40, sometimes as much as 50% of the people who go to vote in primary elections are making the decisions in those final moments. Let me just provide a quick analogy here. Maybe it will be helpful for the conversation.