WaPo published a fascinating piece this morning tied to their latest poll of Kansas. The headline, figurative if not literal, is that they came up with a result that shows incumbent Republican Sen. Roger Marshall not behind Adam Hamilton, but way behind. But they don’t buy their own result. What’s fascinating and laudable is that polls like this, this late in the cycle, often never get released or they get adjusted to bring them more into line with pollsters’ expectations or the consensus of other polls. But here the Post made the decision to release the poll as is and pull back the veil on all the internal details and decisions they made to get the poll as close to what they think is accurate as they could.
Differential response has been the bane of pollsters for more than a decade. We know that no one answers the phone (or the text message) when pollsters get in touch anymore. The problem is that Republicans and Democrats “never” respond at slightly different rates. And even more specifically, the slice of usually disaffected voters that Donald Trump has repeatedly activated when he’s on the presidential ballot are the most poll-resistant of all. So a huge amount of what has happened in the polling industry over the last decade is pollsters trying to find ways to tweak numbers in some coherent way to adjust for getting too few of those poll-shy Trump voters. (And to be clear, this isn’t the old idea that they’re embarrassed to say they support Trump. They just don’t want to talk to pollsters.) Further complicating the issue is that that activation — and the polling misses tied to it — doesn’t seem to happen in midterm elections, based on 2018 and 2022.
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