Did the polls rack up a miss on the presidential election? Some experts say they indicated a closer race than it turned out to be.
But Ashley Koning, head of the Rutgers Eagleton Center for Public Interest Polling, said the polls showed a race that could have gone a number of ways.
“We could very well possibly have seen one of the candidates sweep all seven swing states,” she said, “so I think the polling leading up to Election Day certainly captured that uncertainty and the absolute closeness of the race.”
Koning also said the polarized political environment makes doing surveys harder.
“Polling has become very politicized in the past eight years particularly among the Republican side, and so there is a lot of distrust among Trump supporters of polls and defiance and simply not answering,” she said.
Koning said pollsters are trying to compensate for this with different weighting techniques but it remains a challenge.
Here in New Jersey polls predicted a far easier time for Andy Kim in his bid to take Bob Menendez’ Senate seat, but polling simply isn’t an exact science.
“All of us who polled the Kim-Bashaw race for Senate had Kim with a double-digit lead and obviously it’s half of that,” Koning said, “but I think this really lends itself to the facts of turnout throughout the state, lower turnout among Democrats.”
She also pointed to the general rightward shift in the country as a reason for the closer-than-expected Senate race in New Jersey.