Will election polls be more accurate now that Trump out of office?

A popular theory is that partisan non-response is going to disappear since Trump is not on the ballot. This misses the point.

Five of the biggest Democratic-aligned polling firms released a light autopsy of their 2020 pre-election polls yesterday. The firms — ALG Research, Garin-Hart-Yang Research Group, GBAO Strategies, Global Strategy Group, and Normington Petts — pooled their resources to investigate why their predictions of a Biden landslide were wrong. “Every one of us thought Democrats would have a better Election Day than they did,” the pollsters wrote. Though they did not discover “a single, definitive answer,” there are several hints in their data.

The Democratic pollsters identified four potentially large sources of bias.

First, they found that their polls understated the chance that low-propensity Republican voters would end up turning out. Among this group of people who typically vote very rarely, “the Republican share of the electorate exceeded expectations at four times the rate of the Democratic share,” they wrote. This meant that the polls ended up understating support for Trump and overstatin…