In post-mortems throughout political America, pollsters are being taken to task for getting a lot of what happened on Election Day wrong. And that’s just in figuring out the White vote.
If they couldn’t figure out why Democratic candidates were more competitive than first thought, maybe it’s because pollsters still don’t know how to deal with people of color.
You can’t go scoop up a random sample of a 1,000 or so voters and hope to get a representative sampling. You’ll miss some. Actually, you’ll miss a lot.
So pollsters didn’t see the tight race in Virginia with Democratic Senator Mark Warner edging out Republican Ed Gillespie. Nor could they say what the real difference maker was.
People lying about their civic engagement and not turning out? How about lousy polling methods for diversity?
The Warner race really makes the case for a more diverse sample.
For example, Asian Americans are rarely included in big enough numbers in most mainstream polls, and generally rate an “Insufficient.”
