What if polls are underestimating support for the Democrats?
Save time by listening to our audio articles as you multitaskYet what if polls are underestimating support for the Democrats? Many surveys published in the closing weeks of this midterm campaign have come from firms that are either explicitly affiliated with Republican clients or simply publish numbers that are favourable to the party—what pollsters call a “house effect”.
By this measure, five of the seven pollsters who have surveyed New Hampshire’s Senate race since October 1st have overestimated support for Republicans in the past. One example is Emerson College, a prominent firm that releases surveys of races all around the country. In elections from 2000 through 2020, our model finds Emerson College’s polls overestimated support for Republican candidates for office by one percentage point, compared with the average of pollsters that surveyed the same race.
Finally, our model assesses whether a pollster has released polls that are still biased after controlling for the above sources of error—our so-called “house effect” adjustment. All these adjustments, particularly the last one, make a significant difference to the results of our model. In New Hampshire, for instance, our estimate of the Democrats’ margin in the polls today is 3.1 points if we don’t account for a firm’s house effect or whether a poll is explicitly partisan.
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