The 1936 Literary Digest poll was off by 38 percentage points

George Gallup was off by 12. Think about that next time you see an election poll miss an outcome.

This is a quick post for posterity’s sake.

I have been traveling every couple of weeks since July to promote my book in some sort of event: academic talks, public speeches, panel appearances — you get the picture. It’s in the nature of book promotion that I give roughly the same presentation each time. I pull some numbers and tell some stories about how polls work, how they’ve changed over time, how accurate they are, what the industry’s future looks like, and what this all means not just for election prediction, but democracy too.

I gave a similar talk at Princeton’s Center for the Study of Democratic Politics yesterday, though this one had the benefit of hindsight on how the polls did in the midterms. That was an exciting development in the usual story. Polls, by the way, did pretty well — perhaps their best ever in Senate races.

That is a dramatic shift from the setting of the book’s introductory chapter in 2016 and 2020. This year's polls in competitive Senate races had an average …