{"text":[[{"start":7.393,"text":"US pollsters have warned about the difficulty of forecasting this year’s midterm results after an upset in the Democratic gubernatorial primary in Wisconsin, where a candidate with a 22-point polling deficit won the race."}],[{"start":21.04,"text":"David Crowley on Tuesday unexpectedly defeated democratic socialist Francesca Hong by 0.5 per cent — a boost to the party establishment in a vote that pitted a moderate candidate against an insurgent progressive."}],[{"start":34.3,"text":"The huge miss followed a similar outcome in the party’s Michigan primary last week. Experts say the nature of primaries — typically drawing a small electorate of engaged voters — is throwing things into confusion."}],[{"start":47.04,"text":"Current polling puts Democrats on course to defeat President Donald Trump’s Republicans in November’s midterm elections and win back the US House of Representatives, if the surveys are correct."}],[{"start":58.24,"text":"“Polling primaries is very, very, very hard,” said Joshua Clinton, co-director of the Vanderbilt Poll and the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions. “When one candidate is attracting support among the set of people who are most likely to take polls — college-educated, politically interested and motivated — it is the perfect storm for a polling miss.”"}],[{"start":78.56,"text":"Clinton expects this dynamic to bleed into November’s election, as survey response rates plummet, partisan bias in polls increases and the turnout models adopted in 2024 break down."}],[{"start":null,"text":"
"}],[{"start":90.56,"text":"Recent upsets may have simpler explanations. Hong’s years-old social media post calling for Thanksgiving to be cancelled went viral late in the race and may not have been reflected in polling. She was also criticised after saying her biracial son offered her some “proximity to whiteness”."}],[{"start":107.44,"text":"As one of the last prominent democratic socialists on a primary ticket, she may have lost support due to publicity around radical comments made by her fellow travellers."}],[{"start":116.72,"text":"But experts point to other factors at play."}],[{"start":119.56,"text":"With randomised poll response rates in the low single digits, calling people is often prohibitively expensive and time-consuming, so most pollsters increasingly rely on online, typically opt-in, methods to reach people. These are cheaper, but they come at a cost."}],[{"start":134.8,"text":"The type of person who responds to an online poll is often more politically engaged than the average citizen. With the proliferation of large language models, they can also be bots."}],[{"start":144.28,"text":"“They’re a wacky group of people, if they’re people at all,” said Michael Bailey, a polling expert at Georgetown University."}],[{"start":152.16,"text":"As a result, pollsters have to estimate how many people will show up on election day and reweight their answers based on their assumptions. This is especially hard to do in primary elections since the traditional model of a polarised Democrat-Republican split does not hold."}],[{"start":167.76,"text":"“In primaries, you lose your biggest weighting variable, which is party affiliation . . . So the primaries just become really hard to do,” said Christopher Borick, a polling expert at Lehigh University."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":179.24,"text":"In a world of increasingly hard-to-reach voters, pollsters continue to be blindsided by whether they are reaching the people who will turn out to vote."}],[{"start":187.32,"text":"Last year, the average poll in the three weeks leading up to the New York City Democratic mayoral primary gave Andrew Cuomo a 10.5 per cent lead over Zohran Mamdani. Cuomo ultimately lost by nearly 13 per cent, an extraordinary miss by pollsters."}],[{"start":203.24,"text":"The likely voter models that pollsters relied on were disrupted by unprecedented youth turnout. “What are the weights for the New York City election? You don’t know who’s going to turn out. They make it up,” said Bailey."}],[{"start":216.72,"text":"Pollsters have been adjusting for under-represented groups for well over a decade. Trump’s 2016 victory highlighted that less-educated Republican voters, a big part of the US president’s base, are less likely to respond to polls. To compensate, pollsters now give under-represented voters more weight."}],[{"start":234.66,"text":"Small differences in how pollsters forecast election-day turnout can completely change the results of a poll. And predicting turnout is more difficult than ever because of the yawning gap in the political preferences between people who do and do not respond to polls."}],[{"start":249.88,"text":"“Republicans . . . that are responding to the survey are not Trump Republicans. Then what we’re weighting or how we’re weighting those people really doesn’t fix the problem,” said Ashley Amaya, an associate director of survey methods at Pew Research Center."}],[{"start":262.96,"text":"Still, as methods change and prediction markets emerge as new alternatives, Clinton sees a necessary future for pollsters."}],[{"start":270.44,"text":"“Yes, polling has lots and lots of problems, but if you give up on polling, you’re surrendering any capacity to understand what normal people think,” he said."}],[{"start":286.68,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1786609482_3164.mp3"}