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Good Morning. It’s another record day for virus cases. Obama’s memoir received an ardent rating. And we look at why the polls were wrong.
Make us fools for once …
The polls were wrong again, and much of America wants to know why.
Dozens of pre-election polls suggested Joe Biden would beat President Trump by a wide margin, but the race fell by a percentage point or two in a few states. Polls also showed that Democrats would do much better than they did in Congressional races.
So what happened Here are six key points:
1. In recent years, it appears to have become Republican voters less willing to respond to surveys. Perhaps that shouldn’t come as a surprise, given Trump’s attacks on the media, academia, and other institutions.
2. This phenomenon is not just about working class whites. Respondents made sure to include more of these voters in their sample than it did four years ago when the polls were also missing, but that didn’t solve the problem. A likely reason: even within demographic groups – independent, older, middle-income white women, for example – people who responded to surveys this year were more democratic than people who didn’t.
3. It’s not just about Trump either. Polls even more missed in several Senate races than the President’s race, meaning they did an especially bad job finding people who voted for Biden at the top and a Republican at the bottom.
4. Most simple solutions are unlikely to be real solutions. Since election day, some activists have claimed their private polls are more accurate than public ones. That seems more wrong than true. Biden, Trump, and both parties fought as if their own polls were in line with the public polls, focusing on some states that weren’t really competitive and giving up others that were close to each other.
5. Surveys were still being conducted more accurate in the last four years when they were for most of the 20th century. As pollsters get more information about this year’s election and the mistakes, they will try to fix the issues, much like they did in the past. A new challenge: In the age of smartphones, survey response rates are much lower than they used to be.
6. We journalists can better convey uncertainty in surveys. Surveys will never be perfect. It is too difficult to grasp the opinions of a large, diverse country. And in today’s tightly divided US, small voting errors can make outsiders look like favorites and vice versa. All of us – journalists, campaigners, and the many Americans obsessed with politics – shouldn’t forget this. We just got another reminder.
And my colleague Nate Cohn, who knows more about the subject than almost anyone, points out that a significant portion of the error involved Hispanic voters. Nate also discussed polls on episodes of the podcasts “The Daily” and “The Argument”.
Elsewhere: Sarah Isgur of The Dispatch says the problem isn’t with Trump voters lying about their preference. Charles Franklin of Marquette University suggests the pandemic has surprisingly affected voter turnout. Kristen Soltis Anderson, a Republican pollster, notes that polls in many states will still be “incredibly close” to the bottom line.
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Lived life: Lucille Bridges defied abuse by white protesters when she and her 6-year-old daughter Ruby went to an all-white school in New Orleans in 1960 and crossed one of the most defended color lines in the divided south. Bridges died at 86.
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Broadway is closed. It’s everywhere too.
These are difficult times for live theater. The pandemic has closed Broadway and many local theaters since March, leaving actors, stage workers, and others unemployed, and fans have missed the shows. But there’s one way the theater can thrive right now: Broadway has become a major source of television entertainment.
A partial list of recent and upcoming releases includes “The Prom”, “The Boys in the Band”, “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom”, “West Side Story” and “Wicked”. The movie version of “Hamilton” was so popular that it contributed to a surge in registrations for Disney Plus, according to The Verge. And in a Broadway musical that focuses on the life of Diana, Princess of Wales will debut on Netflix before stage production begins.
Why is this happening now? One reason is the “insatiable desire of streaming services for content, even niche content,” writes Alexis Soloski in The Times. There is also more intermingling between theater, film and television than in the past. Playwright Jeremy O. Harris, who wrote “Slave Play,” signed a deal with HBO earlier this year; Phoebe Waller-Bridge, who originally wrote and performed “Fleabag” as a one-woman play, signed one on Amazon.
Some critics fear that film versions could cannibalize the sale of live tickets. But no film can fully reproduce the experience of a live show. Just look at the appalling reaction from social media to last year’s movie version of “Cats”.
The Times recommends: “What the constitution means to me,” says Heidi Schreck about the impact of the document on our daily lives.
PLAY, WATCH, EAT
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