The Washington Post has admitted that polling for the midterm elections may suffer from the same inaccuracy issues that plagued that of previous elections.
The outlet said in an article Friday that pollsters made more than 85,000 phone calls for their survey and sent out nearly 50,000 text messages to try to determine the state of the U.S. Senate contest in Kansas.
‘Are Republican voters this late in the election cycle feeling so down about their party’s chances that they just don’t want to talk about it?’
Although the Post released the results, WaPo polling director Scott Clement admitted there was evidence once again that Republicans were being undercounted.
“Democrats were far more enthusiastic about taking the poll than Republicans were,” he reported. “Registered Democrats were more than twice as likely as registered Republicans to complete the survey after answering an interviewer’s call — 32 percent versus 12 percent — with a similar partisan gap when texting voters to complete the survey online.”
He called it a “supersize version” of a concern that has been “vexing” pollsters for a decade.
That same concern was voiced by polling expert and political strategist Frank Luntz in a recent segment with CNN.
“We know that they don’t respond to phone calls. We know that in the exit polling back in 2016, and I say this publicly because I want people to hear this,” Luntz said about supporters of President Donald Trump.
“I got 2016 wrong. I believed in the exit polls. Trump voters walked away, refused to participate, because they thought that it was against them,” he explained.
“They thought that the polls were all biased,” Luntz added. “And that’s what Republicans are being told right now: ‘Don’t believe the polls. They’re not accurate.’ Well, they may be; we’re about to find out.”
A pollster trying to gauge a state Senate district in Iowa expressed similar problems.
Clement said pollsters took steps in the WaPo/George Mason University poll in Kansas to try to overcome the natural bias against polling among Republican voters.
“But it’s possible those efforts fell short,” he added.
The WaPo article noted that historically polling underestimated support for the president in the presidential elections of 2016, 2020, and 2024, by three to five percentage points.
However, polling did not “consistently overestimate” support for Republicans in the 2018 and 2022 midterm elections.
“The partisan enthusiasm gap likely explains the disconnect between Democratic and Republican willingness to respond,” said Mark Rozell, dean of the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University, a poll co-sponsor.
“With an unpopular president, inflation, a war that Trump voters never asked for, the lack of GOP enthusiasm is not surprising,” he added. “Are Republican voters this late in the election cycle feeling so down about their party’s chances that they just don’t want to talk about it?”
Election Day is just four days away.
Blaze News’ Poll Watch shows Democrat Adam Hamilton ahead of incumbent Republican Sen. Roger Marshall in the Kansas Senate race by 2.6 points.
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Election, Washington post, Polling, Politics, Kansas
