The Polling Crisis Is a Catastrophe for American Democracy
Even with the results of the presidential contest still out, there’s a clear loser in this election: polling.
Surveys badly missed the results, predicting an easy win for former Vice President Joe Biden, a Democratic pickup in the Senate, and gains for the party in the House. Instead, the presidential election is still too close to call, Republicans seem poised to hold the Senate, and the Democratic edge in the House is likely to shrink.
This is a disaster for the polling industry and for media outlets and analysts that package and interpret the polls for public consumption, such as , ’ Upshot,and ’s election unit. They now face serious existential questions. But the greatest problem posed by the polling crisis is not in the presidential election, where the snapshots provided by polling are ultimately
