The one polling firm that was right and how they did it [View all]

[soandso]

This seems consistent with the things that Nate Silver said about the pollsters who got it wrong.

I was the only pollster to predict the Trump landslide
James Johnson – a former adviser to Theresa May – reveals how his firm, JL Partners, called the scale of Trump’s shock victory. ‘Trump might be a wolf,’ one voter told him, ‘but he’s straight about it’


First, rather than just using one method to reach voters, we utilised a mixed-mode approach. Our research found that phone-only polls give too much weight to those who are willing to give pollsters the time of day on the phone: our statistics show that such a person is more likely to be an older, white, liberal woman. This was the undoing of the poll by Ann Selzer that showed Harris winning Iowa by three points (Trump went on to win the state by 13).

Online-only polls also over-sample. They pick up too many people who are educated, more engaged, younger, and working from home. Those groups are all more likely to vote Democrat.

Instead, we blended our methods, depending on the audience we were trying to reach, using an in-house algorithm. We used a combination of live call to cell, live call to landline, SMS to web, online panel, and in-app game polling. Each method reached a different type of voter – the latter, for example, incentivising poll responses by awarding in-game points as people play games on their phone, is more likely to pick up young, non-white men. That showed that 30 per cent of our non-white sample backed Trump, in line with the results.

We picked up that elusive Trump voter who is less likely to trust polls, or have the time to fill them out, by meeting them on their own terms as they went about their daily lives.

https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/trump-harris-election-polling-b2643873.html