The polls don't work — and that's a good thing

Binoculars.
(Image credit: Illustrated | iStock)

The polls in the 2020 election were wrong, bigly. That's according to a postmortem report issued by the American Association of Public Opinion Research (AAPOR). After reviewing nearly 3,000 surveys, researchers found that national polls overestimated Joe Biden's support by an average of 3.9 percent, while state polls were off by 4.3 percent. These errors of "unusual magnitude" were the biggest miss since 1980, when polls understated Ronald Reagan's support by eight points.

The report takes the problem more seriously than more defensive responses from within the polling industry. It also admits that scholars still don't understand what went wrong.

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Samuel Goldman

Samuel Goldman is a national correspondent at TheWeek.com. He is also an associate professor of political science at George Washington University, where he is executive director of the John L. Loeb, Jr. Institute for Religious Freedom and director of the Politics & Values Program. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard and was a postdoctoral fellow in Religion, Ethics, & Politics at Princeton University. His books include God's Country: Christian Zionism in America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018) and After Nationalism (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021). In addition to academic research, Goldman's writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and many other publications.