Liberty Vittert: Trump is wrong — pollsters didn’t deliberately make inaccurate election forecasts
President Trump told reporters Thursday night that pollsters very deliberately made false claims that former Vice President Joe Biden had a big lead in the presidential race in order to suppress Trump votes and help Biden be elected president. As a statistician and polling expert, I have to respectfully disagree with the president.
The president’s accusation doesn’t make sense. Pollsters poll on many more issues than political campaigns, and their businesses depend on their reputations for accurate polling. Think about it: why would any business hire a pollster if it thought the polling was inaccurate?
So if pollsters want to get clients and stay in business, it’s in their self-interest to make their polls as accurate as possible. This isn’t to say the pollsters don’t make mistakes — they do, and clearly did in this election. But that doesn’t mean they purposely falsified their polling results to help Biden, as President Trump has charged.
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