Yesterday, the American Association for Public Opinion Research released a report on polling for the 2020 election. It was pretty ugly. This is the key, in my view, finding.

• The 2020 polls featured polling error of an unusual magnitude: It was the highest in 40 years for the national popular vote and the highest in at least 20 years for state-level estimates of the vote in presidential, senatorial, and gubernatorial contests.5 Among polls conducted in the final two weeks, the average error on the margin in either direction was 4.5 points for national popular vote polls and 5.1 points for state-level presidential polls.
• The polling error was much more likely to favor Biden over Trump. Among polls conducted in the last two weeks before the election, the average signed error on the vote margin was too favorable for Biden by 3.9 percentage points in the national polls and by 4.3 percentage points in statewide presidential polls. //

This is some great analytical jujitsu. What this guy is saying is, “We were wrong four years ago because we underestimated the number of uneducated rubes who would vote for Trump and we fixed that problem. As a result our 2020 results were worse than our 2016. But we’re really sure than its Republicans screwing around with the hard science of polling.” //

So, let’s recap. Polls favored Democrats regardless of the method used. Polls favored Democrats across most of the polling industry, no matter the modeling used by the analysts. The polls went the same direction in very similar amounts. The best reasons they can come up with is that Republicans aren’t participating because President Trump said mean things about them OR they are interviewing in great numbers Republicans who are not representative of the Republicans who turn out to vote… //

I think there is an easier explanation for what happened that doesn’t involve the entire polling industry’s failure to discover a key segment of GOP/conservative voters. The polls were conducted to drive a media narrative that America was appalled with Trump and with the GOP, and the Democrats were going to win big up and down the ticket. The polls provided the hook for “news” stories and fodder for talk shows. The idea was to create an air of inevitability about a Biden win. What they did not factor in was the anger of the conservative base and the degree to which millions of Americans felt that President Trump stood up for them and repaid that perceived loyalty by voting for him.