Polling and forecasting in 2024 and beyond | #215 - May 14, 2023

Pollsters are "worried about Trump" again. But the problems in public opinion surveys run much deeper

Dear readers, here is a brief note relevant to the nerds.

I did not attend the annual meeting of the American Association of Public Opinion Research (AAPOR), held last week in Philadelphia, this year due to some professional obligations that kept me in Washington. Luckily the conference had a lot of highly engaged Twitter users that posted lots of grainy photos of PowerPoint slides that gives us a good public look into how America’s pollsters — both public and private — are addressing some deep-rooted problems in opinion research.

Here is some reporting on the conference from POLITICO and the New York Times. Both articles are good and I recommend reading them. And here is one Tweet I find particularly consequential, and another I think is funny.

For my part, however, I want to draw attention to one single chart. Courtesy of a post by Ariel Edwards-Levy, CNN’s Editor of Polling and Analytics, of a presentation by Mark Blumenthal (who helped start the polling aggregation site Pollster.com…