Pollsters: Election Forecast Inaccurate Due to Lack of Republicans

Multiple pollsters told NPR on Thursday that a lack of variety among respondents, particularly concerning Republicans and levels of education, led to inaccurate polls ahead of the 2020 elections.

"It's safe to say that we don't have enough Republicans in our samples," Cliff Zukin, a retired Rutgers University political science professor and longtime pollster, told NPR.

Courtney Kennedy, Pew Research Center's director of survey research, added that pollsters "almost always have too many college graduates who took the survey because they're just more amenable to doing it. And in this political era, that's correlated with support for Democrats."

She also noted that "the Republicans taking the polls may not have been good proxies for all of the Republicans."

RealClearPolitics senior elections analyst Sean Trende suggested that supporters of President Donald Trump were less likely to take part in surveys.

"The No. 1 prediction of being a Trump supporter was agreeing with the statement, 'People like me don't have much say in this country,'" he said. "And those are the exact people that when you hear a phone call and the person says, 'Hi, I'm from The New York Times. Would you take a call?' just go click."

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