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Good Tuesday morning. I'm Adrienne Hurst and welcome to your Playbook Daily briefing.

Remember after the 2016 election when basically every Democratic pollster and their mother vowed to figure out what went wrong so they could never be that wrong again?

Well, five of the top Democratic polling firms are joining forces to try to explain once and for all what went wrong in 2020,

when they predicted victories for the party up and down the ballot that just didn't happen.

As Politico's polling guru, Steve Shepard, scoops this morning, the competing firms banded together after the election to conduct a self-autopsy of sorts.

It found major errors and a failure to, quote, live up to our own expectations, but it found

no easy solution to the problem of consistently overestimating how major Democratic candidates,

including Joe Biden, would perform. For big culprits the pollsters did find. First,

deteriorating public trust in institutions, government, the news media, and, yes, the polling industry,

driven by Trump's bashing of those very institutions. Essentially, Trump's voters were,

surprise, less willing to participate in the polls.

Second, pollsters again underestimated turnout among rural and white non-college voters, who overwhelmingly backed Trump.

Third, a failure to detect late movement toward Trump and Republican candidates in the run-up to the election.

And finally, not accurately accounting for the fact that Democrats stayed home and answered their phones in greater numbers last year than Republicans who did not follow COVID restrictions quite as closely. So knowing all of these problems exist should make it easier for pollsters to avoid them next time around, right? Well, not necessarily.

The thing is, even before Trump, the polling industry had been struggling to adapt to fewer landlines,

which are relatively reliable for survey takers. And now, post-Trump, the challenge of measuring

public sentiment is even tougher when few people want to answer the phone and many actively

distrust pollsters. Here's what the five Democratic firms landed on, to quote their memo.

While there is evidence some of these theories played a part, no consensus on a solution has emerged.

What we have settled on is the idea there is something systematically different about the people we reached

and the people we did not. Put another way, as one of the pollsters told Shepard, who got the scoop on

...