Polls are again under scrutiny, with some rushing in to proclaim their demise. But it isn’t that polls have gotten worse. Rather, a mix of factors is creating unprecedented challenges for polling and for the public trying to understand it.
Why? First, there are the perennial challenges that are consistently misunderstood. Surveys are well suited to measure beliefs and attitudes about issues, and they can capture respondents’ candidate preferences pretty accurately. But predicting who will actually turn out to vote will always be an imperfect effort, largely because people are bad at predicting their own behavior and tend to report aspirations rather than realities.