\n\n“Pollsters are increasingly embracing new methods in the run-up to the 2022 midterms after notable misses in recent races. Front of mind is the looming 2024 election cycle, when former President Donald Trump \u2014 whose support among the electorate has bedeviled pollsters trying to measure it for the past seven years, including missing low on Trump\u2019s vote before his 2016 win and underestimating the closeness of his 2020 loss \u2014 could be on the ballot for the third consecutive presidential election.”
…
“Increasingly, pollsters across the field favor combining multiplemethods of contact in the same poll, seeking to include the hardest-to-reach Americans.”
…
“It\u2019s already happening across the board. After ending their more-than-30-year partnership with NBC News after the 2020 election, the Wall Street Journal\u2019s new poll \u2014 a cooperative effort between the pollsters for both Trump and President Joe Biden \u2014 reaches a quarter of its respondents via text message. The technique, called \u201ctext-to-web,\u201d sends a link to an internet survey, and those interviews are added to others conducted by voiceover landlines and cell phones.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Over the past year, CNN\u2019s polling has spanned a wide range of methods. Conducted both over the phone and the internet, some polls are conducted from respondents who have joined a panel maintained by SSRS, the Pennsylvania-based company that conducts polls for CNN and other outlets. But the samples for two other CNN polls \u2014 one earlier this year and one in the summer of 2021 \u2014 were obtained by mailing solicitations to people at home and asking them to participate, either on the phone or the web.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Prior to last summer, all of CNN\u2019s national polling had been conducted by phone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Large media outlets have experimented with emerging methodologies before. CBS News and The New York Times did some of the first major media polling over the internet in 2014.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
…<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“as Americans become increasingly more difficult to reach, traditional methods are becoming more untenable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThese things are only getting harder,\u201d said one pollster who was granted anonymity to offer a candid assessment of the state of the industry. \u201cSo if you\u2019re just doing the same thing, it\u2019s only going to get worse.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The innovations are not limited to sampling and data collection. But devising new weighting parameters \u2014 ways to adjust the results to better reflect the electorate \u2014 is more difficult. That\u2019s because one of the main culprits of the 2020 election miss appears to be people who don\u2019t respond to polls \u2014 so-called \u201cnonresponse bias.\u201d Voters in that group were more likely to support Trump, which made it harder for polls to reflect the true measure of his support.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
…<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“some of the newproposals include weighting data to some social benchmarks, like the percentage of people who know and talk to their neighbors, or whovolunteer in their community. Others suggest asking whether people trust media or polling in order to determine if their sample is too establishment-friendly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The implementation of new methods is also happening at the campaign level, though to a lesser degree. Campaign pollsters \u2014 whose jobs involve giving candidates and outside groups strategic advice more than simply measuring the horse race \u2014 are dipping their toes tentatively into less-familiar waters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In general, Democratic firms \u2014 many of which\u00a0banded together after the 2020 election<\/a>\u00a0to study went wrong \u2014 are more open to experimentation.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n