Not All of the Polls Were Wrong
Slate News
Slate Podcasts
4.5 • 6K Ratings
🗓️ 12 November 2020
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In the lead-up to the 2020 election, Iowa polls had Biden and Trump running neck and neck to win the state’s 6 electoral votes. However, one poll in late October showed that Trump had taken a seven-point lead over Biden. Many political observers and Democrats dismissed it as an outlier, insisting that Iowa was up for grabs. On election night? Trump won Iowa by just over eight points.
How did Ann Selzer see this coming? And what does the “Outlier Queen” have to say about the state of her industry?
Guest: Ann Selzer, public opinion pollster and President of Selzer and Company.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | In Iowa, Anne Selzer is known for her political polls. |
| 0:08.9 | Polls that surprise people. |
| 0:11.5 | I've heard all of these nicknames for you. |
| 0:13.6 | Like, my favorite is the Cassandra of Des Moines. |
| 0:16.7 | But do you have a favorite? |
| 0:18.6 | Well, I've recently sort of resurrected the title of Outlier Queen. |
| 0:25.1 | That is, I've had any number of polls that looked like an outlier were dismissed as an outlier |
| 0:30.4 | and then turned out to be pretty close. |
| 0:34.7 | So, Queen, I have a little tiara collection, so that fits me just fine. |
| 0:39.4 | Do you literally have a tiara collection? I literally have a tiara collection. |
| 0:44.5 | Anne's polls don't just catch people by surprise. They're also surprisingly accurate. |
| 0:50.5 | She started getting attention back in 2008. That's when she was one of the only people to predict Barack Obama would dominate the Iowa caucuses. |
| 0:59.7 | Since election results began coming in last week, there's been this debate about the polls, how good they are whether we should pay attention to them anymore. |
| 1:09.7 | So many of them simply got this election |
| 1:12.5 | wrong, predicted Joe Biden would run up big margins, and that Democrats in the House and Senate |
| 1:18.4 | would do the same. But I wanted to talk to Anne, because this year, she really earned her |
| 1:24.3 | title, the outlier queen. You're one of the few pollsters who got something right because your last poll in Iowa really, it wasn't exact because nothing's exact, but it showed the direction things were heading. |
| 1:42.2 | I wonder if you can describe when that poll was released what it showed |
| 1:47.9 | and what was the reaction you got to it. So we were in the field starting the Monday a week ahead |
| 1:56.1 | of the election. So Monday night, Tuesday night, Wednesday night, Thursday night. We're of course |
| 2:00.2 | looking at our data on a daily basis, seeing how things are going. And it's with, you know, relatively few interviews per night, just a couple of hundred. There's a fair amount of bounciness to it. |
| 2:11.6 | Yeah, you've talked about how like the polling, there's like bounce in it in the first few days. Like it wobbles around before stabilizing. Is that how you'd frame it? It is. And there's like bounce in it in the first few days. Like it wobbles around before stabilizing. Is that how |
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