I’m Gen Z. I have never been polled. I’ve asked probably close to 20 of my other Gen Z friends if they’ve ever been polled. Literally none of them had been, even the ones in swing states.
From that, I gather Gen Z is massively underreported in polls. Good news is, it seems like at least 3/4 of us, if not more, are very left.
BUT good poll results aren’t just “we polled 1,000 people and here’s who they’re voting for.”
Good pollsters take demographic data when they poll. They model the biases of different demos, and they correct for those biases in their models.
Yes, reducing underrepresentation at poll time would be ideal. But pollsters are smart and are doing their best to put out good models. Pollsters know Gen Z is underrepresented and are accounting for that already.
In other words, don’t let Gen Z underrepresentation in the polls lull you into a false sense of security. The polls are accurate. The race is neck and neck.
The problem with polls is they try to determine who is or is not a “likely voter”.
Look at the polling out of PA, check the left hand column here, 22 polls, 18 are “LV” or likely voter, as opposed to RV or registered voter.
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-general/2024/pennsylvania/
In most cases, one of the criteria for “likely” is “did you vote in the last election?”
So, um, yeah, about that…
https://www.bernama.com/en/world/news.php?id=2358865
Those 100,000 new voters would have been discounted by pollsters as unlikely because they did not vote in 2020.
That doesn’t even take into account kids who turned 18 since the last election.
Another problem with polls is that the poll takers were off the mark in both of the last two elections, generally towards the Democratic side. So some of them compensate not by modifying their methodology, but by goosing the numbers by the same amount in the other direction this time around. They might say “Hey, we underestimated the guy by 2% in this state last time, so let’s give him a 2% mulligan”.
If you know polling is an inexact science, and you were wrong consistently in one direction twice in a row, it is better for your reputation if you are off in the other direction this time.
I personally lie to pollsters because ALL polls are push polls. I can’t be the only one who feels this way. So tired of being a useful idiot, so I try to be less useful.
It all for engagement and clicks. Personally I believe reporting on “polling data” should be banned from News organizations because it’s all bs
Depends on which media you listen to. IMO, nobody knows anything so they are scaring people to go vote.
