JOSEPH CAMPBELL: No cheery time for election pollsters in run‑up to US midterms.

Pollsters approach this year’s midterm elections dogged by high-profile misfires in recent elections while facing challenges from brash rivals intent on reshaping the landscape of political forecasts.

There are no guarantees that polling’s troubles – and persistent popular skepticism about the dependability of election polls – will be alleviated anytime soon.

In fact, it hasn’t been very cheery for pollsters for the better part of 10 years, since Donald Trump confounded poll-based expectations to defeat Hillary Clinton for the U.S. presidency in 2016.

In 2020, pollsters turned in their worst collective performance in 40 years by overestimating margins of Joe Biden’s victory over Trump. It’s an outcome I discuss in “Lost in a Gallup,” my book about polling failure.

Polling in the 2022 midterms was more spotty than spectacular. In 2024, pollsters overall underestimated Trump’s popular support — for the third successive election. That outcome prompted The Atlantic to describe the 2024 polls as “quietly still bad.”

Read the whole thing.