NBC/Marist Haven’t Learned Their Lessons
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Evan Scrimshaw | Jul 27, 2020 |
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On Election Night 2018, one of the most fun subplots was when the 538 Live Model crashed Democratic chances to win the House, based on a bad result in the Indiana Senate race and losing the Kentucky 6th. People blamed 538’s model for overreacting, but they missed one of the actual culprits for the swing – NBC/Marist, whose last poll of the Indiana Senate race had shown a close but comfortable Donnelly lead, which in turn led to 538 as being fairly confident that Donnelly would win again – with his win chances going into the night being north of 70%. NBC/Marist would then be wrong in Florida and Missouri, and get the right winner – but by a wide error on margin – in Wisconsin Governor, where they had Democrat Tony Evers up 10% (he would win by less than 2%). And now, NBC/Marist is refusing to learn their lessons. They are dangerously arrogant, ignoring the evidence of their failures and making spurious and untestable claims about the 2019 Kentucky Governor’s race as a reason to not weight their polls by education.
If you believe them, the electorate in 2020 in North Carolina will be 4 points more non-white than 2020, and within that, that white voters with a degree will make up 2 points more of the electorate as a whole. In other words, they think the share of the electorate that will be white non-degree will decline 6% cycle over cycle – which, frankly, if you believe that is true, there’s a bridge in Alaska I’d love to sell you. The act of not weighing by education means that their polling is going to oversell the Democrats, by boosting white voters who like Joe Biden at the expense of those who don’t. Whatever regional weighting they are doing doesn’t matter if they are getting a sample that is tilted. Their incompetence is staggering, as is the fact that NBC isn’t challenging them on it.
Outfits like this that are willing to do such stupid and audaciously bad practice are why the polling industry has such a bad name at this point. It is malpractice that Marist is sticking to their guns despite an actively bad 2018 in a cycle when the national polls were bang on. They are stuck on an old axis, where education wasn’t all that much of a dividing line, and they cannot acknowledge that this has changed. In the early 2000s there wasn’t a huge split between how whites with and without a degree voted, as working class whites were much more loyal to Democrats and wealthy degree holders still were Republicans. You could have missed your education numbers by a bit and still been mostly right, but with the way that those groups have split in recent years, the divide is stark.
The bigger problem, even more than the fact that Marist is producing literally unbelievable numbers (like, sincerely, don’t believe them, they’re wrong), lies in the fact that Marist is refusing to change their methods when the facts change. This dogmatic approach is going to kill the polling industry as events and coalitions change, and if they don’t think they need a change, well, they’re in for a rude awakening. Put bluntly, until this is fixed, Marist polling isn’t worth the paper it is proverbially printed on. Unless they get their heads out of their asses, Democrats should treat Marist polling like they would a Democratic internal – with caution, and a hefty house effect.