It’s not that the pollsters didn’t try to fix the problems that plagued them in the last elections. Whether it’s public companies conducting media surveys and academic instruction or consultants for private campaigns, they have spent the past two years tweaking their methods to avoid a repeat of 2020.

But most of the changes they made were small. Some pollsters hope that since Trump is not running in the midterms, the problems of underestimating the Republican vote will go away with him. But others worry that Trump’s continued dominance of the news cycle — from the FBI’s seizure of classified documents in Mar-a-Lago to the litigation against his business in New York — effectively makes him the central political figure on Election Day.

“There is no doubt that polling errors in [20]16 and [20]“20 worry about the polling profession, worry me as a pollster,” said Charles Franklin, director of polling director at Marquette Law School in Milwaukee and a longtime pollster in Wisconsin. “The worrying part is how unique that is when Donald Trump is on the ballot, versus half the time when he’s not on the ballot.”

After 2016, The pollsters said the problem Their samples included very few voters without college degrees. Opinion polls fared better in the 2018 midterm elections, even though they were still very Democratic in the balance.

Then came 2020 – which was worse than 2016, which the pollsters haven’t settled on yet definitive explanation For what exactly happened. as a result of, easy solution Proved to be elusive. But pollsters mostly agreed that polls missed a significant portion of Trump voters who refused to take part in polls, especially in 2020.

Current opinion polls for 2022 are overwhelmingly favorable to Democrats. FiveThirtyEight’s “light” prediction model, based solely on the latest polling data, says Democrats have a 79 percent chance of retaining control of the Senate. This prospect runs counter to the expectations of both parties and most independent handicappers, who consider the battle for room akin to a coin flip.

And the The New York Times noted Some of the strongest numbers for Democrats come from states that have experienced the biggest loss in the polls over the past few elections.

Selinda Lake, a prominent Democratic pollster, told POLITICO that her company, Lake Research Partners, is working hard to get the right balance of voters in its samples — but a certain segment of Trump voters is increasingly elusive, especially as the former president’s exploits grabbed the headlines in Recently.

“It was less [of an issue] Leek said. “It seems to us that it has become a problem lately, with the Mar-a-Lago team, with its candidates winning a lot of these primaries, with the January 6 committee.”

Her company is not alone in mitigating these problems. Quinnipiac University in Connecticut, a longtime player in political opinion polls, released opinion polls last week showing the senator. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) Leading GOP candidate Herschel Walker by 6 percentage points, despite other polls showing a tied race or even a narrow Walker advantage, and Democrats with it Big progress in each of the major statewide races in Connecticut.

Doug Schwartz, director of the Quinnipiac University poll, said interviewees have changed the way they ask respondents about their choice of vote, taking care to separate those who say they are hesitant from those who refuse to answer the question directly.

“Ultimately, we hope to reduce that percentage of people who don’t give us an answer on horse racing,” Schwartz said, noting that while they accurately reflect Biden’s vote share in 2020 before — in the polls, the high number of rejections resulted in to underestimate Trump. Quinnipiac was now – President Joe Biden is leading Trump in two states Trump will carry, Florida and Ohio election eve.

Another academic pollster at Northeastern University, Marist College, released two surveys last week: One shows Warnock five points ahead of Walkerand the other shows Ohio Republican Senate candidate J.D. Vance Running neck and neck with the Democrat. Tim Ryan.

Marist also had some missteps in 2020, with Biden showing a 6-point lead in North Carolina (which he lost) and a 5-point lead in Pennsylvania (which he won by one point) in NBC News polls. Since 2020, Marist’s Meringoff told me the school has diversified its samples by contacting voters not only via phone calls, but also through text messages and online interviews.

Meringov told Politico he’s not worried about the same unresponsiveness bias — the segment of Trump voters who will not take part in opinion polls, and which systematically skew results toward Democrats — appearing this year. That’s because, he said, Trump himself isn’t on the ballot, and Democrats have mostly wiped out the GOP’s enthusiasm advantage this summer.

“I am very relieved that what was the case in the previous elections may not be the case this time in terms of errors,” Meringov said.

In the recent midterm elections, the most prolific pollster was Siena College in Upstate New York, thanks to an ambitious nearly $2 million “direct polling” project with the New York Times to conduct a survey. Dozens of congressional districts. In all, the Times and Siena conducted nearly 100 referendums that accurately depicted the Democrats’ momentum in their successful attempt to overturn the House majority.

This year, Siena is holding a swing statewide vote with or without the Times, including two new ballots last week in Wisconsin And the Texas Conducted for Spectrum News, the local news outlet for the cable company Charter Communications.

Don Levy, director of the Siena College Research Institute, said he is “as keen as possible” to increase the share of Trump voters, both in sampling (who gets called to participate) and weighting (making them more important after interviews in order to fix their underrepresentation). It’s not enough just to contact more Republicans, Levy said, because he’s a particular type of Republican who struggles to reach them.

It is not a partisan lack of response. “The unresponsiveness of Trump supporters has become even more solid,” Levy said. “A small majority of these are self-identified Republicans, but a large number of them are independents or self-identified Democrats. You can’t correct that by saying, ‘Let’s weigh the Republicans down. It’s not working.’”

Monmouth University, in New Jersey, is trying a different approach – avoiding horse racing polls to conduct polls that measure each candidate’s level of support without pitting them against one another. Patrick Murray, director of the school’s polling institute, said his analysis of the 2020 results did not reveal a “silver bullet” for poll reform, which also failed to predict the New Jersey governor’s race closer than expected last year.

Murray warned pollsters who haven’t given up on horse racing that the dynamics of this year’s midterms are different than they were in the previous election – and likely to be different than the next in a couple of years. “If the 2022 polls are good, that doesn’t necessarily mean we fixed what went wrong in 2020,” he said.

Franklin, a Wisconsin pollster, said: He has made “moderate or marginal adjustments” to Marquette Law School’s survey methodology, including increasing the proportion of respondents contacted by cell phone. He also pays close attention to the response rate of his polls in Wisconsin counties that favored Trump more in the last election — but so far, voters there aren’t turning out in smaller numbers.

Another mistake in the polling process, Franklin said, “will continue to damage the reputation of the ballot.” “I think this is obvious and undeniable.”

It may also be inevitable. Party pollsters in both parties have indicated that it is once again difficult to attract Trump voters in the run-up to this election.

“There is a good chance that a lot of the polls that have been released publicly overestimate the power of Democrats,” said Glenn Bolger, a Republican pollster at Public Opinion Strategies.

Amanda Yovino, a Republican pollster for WPA Intelligence who worked on Virginia Governor Glenn Yongkin’s race last fall, added, “It’s still easier to get college-educated voters on the phone” than voters who haven’t graduated from college.

Lake, the Democratic pollster, said she sees the procedures her colleagues are applying to get the right mix of voters. But she’s not sure it will be enough to avoid missing another in the 2020 election.

“I’m sure they’re the right things,” Lake said. “I’m not sure it’s enough.”

But some Democrats not only dare to believe in the polls — but hope that the party will actually outperform in November, pointing to two particular wins in congressional elections last month in Alaska and New York, where polls showed Republicans leading on Election Day.

“I’ve just seen polls underestimate victories both in Alaska and in upstate New York,” Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (DN.Y.), the chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said in an interview at a POLITICO Pro Premium Roundtable event earlier this month. “So, if anything, the polls may be showing conservative bias at the moment.”