The real "crisis" in polling

Issue polling is difficult and imprecise. But if anything, the crisis is in political analysis

An old “issue” poll. (Yeah, I think we can do better than this.)

Dear reader,

I joined this week’s 538 politics podcast to discuss the alleged “crisis” in issue polling — a case argued recently by New York Times chief political analyst Nate Cohn. In an article, Cohn writes that “there’s a case that ‘issue’ polling faces a far graver crisis than ‘horse race’ polling” because — as he sees it— pre-election polls in 2022 did not give him issue-based reasons to expect that Democrats were going to do as well as they did in the House or Senate. The issue polls, per this account, failed him. He writes:

But although [2022 horse race] polls performed well, they simply didn’t explain what happened. If anything, the polls were showing the conditions for a Republican win. They showed that voters wanted Republican control of the Senate. They showed that a majority of voters didn’t really care whether a candidate thought Joe Biden won the 2020 election, even though election deniers wound up being clear…