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It’s 1 a.m. on Nov. 4, and there’s no clear winner of the 2020 presidential election. Once again, the polls have proved so very wrong in predicting who will win states across the country. The best example came with the call of Florida for President Donald Trump.

Florida was consistently reported to carry a slim lead for former Vice President Joe Biden, with FiveThirtyEight reporting that Biden was leading consistently by two to 10 points in polls for the past few weeks. But as the results have shown, Trump is clearly leading the state, meaning some of the poll results have been up to 10 points off the mark.

Why have polls been wrong two elections in a row, and what is the future of their use in elections?

Following the 2016 election, many speculated that Americans hadn’t turned out because polling had suggested that there was no need to, as former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was going to win. That’s clearly not the case in this election, where voter turnout has reached highs not seen in decades. Instead, the stigma of being a Trump supporter seems to be the most probable reason — people don’t want to admit that they’re Trump supporters.

Robert Cahaly, a pollster who predicted the 2016 Trump win, calls this social acceptability bias. He predicted it would happen again this year. The polls fail to recognize that people are embarrassed to support Trump and that those who aren’t politically involved often don’t want to spend the time participating in surveys.

It’s no longer responsible to use polling as a measure to predict a candidate’s chance of winning an election. It misleads voters and creates a false sense of security on both sides. It makes sense that campaigns would want data to influence their strategy in an election, but sharing that data with residents as news is unfair. The news media is not providing adequate context to the data or making it clear that its statistical methods may be skewed. We take what news organizations report as fact, even when it may be completely wrong, and we base our election results on it.

The past two presidential elections have been exhausting, partially because the polling is so far off-base. Reliance on polling can create a false narrative about our candidates. Americans are tired. We don’t need any more rapid changes than what we are already getting.

Megan Cooper is a freshman political science and magazine news and digital journalism major. Her column appears bi-weekly. She can be reached at mpcooper@syr.edu.

Published on November 4, 2020 at 1:18 pm