Election pollsters may be ‘herding’ and giving the impression Trump is stronger than he really is, Focaldata research suggests.
The British are a-coming. This time, they’re wielding a new polling technique with a huge survey sample that some say is more accurate than anything currently in widespread use in U.S. politics — and it’s tentatively predicting a Kamala Harris win.
Focaldata, a U.K. polling company, questioned more than 31,000 voters across the United States over the past month for an innovative type of survey called “MRP” that has become influential in Britain in recent years. The results were shared exclusively with POLITICO.
Combining the MRP results with their large-scale online swing state polling Focaldata assesses Harris is likely to take Michigan, with a lead of nearly 5 points, Nevada with a lead of about 2 points over Trump, and with a slight edge in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
The Focaldata research suggests Trump just scraping past Harris in Georgia and North Carolina. The polling data and MRP modeling are split on Arizona.
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Harris’ advantage comes in part from her strong appeal to older white women, a historically right-leaning group. Trump has made gains with younger Black and Hispanic men.
“Our MRP model has shown a Trump win throughout the campaign and only in the final update has it nudged Democrat,” said James Kanagasooriam, Focaldata’s chief research officer.
Even though the research points to a Democratic victory emerging from Tuesday’s election, the researchers remain wary of nailing their colors to the mast. That’s not unusual in a contest that’s become defined by the phrase “toss-up.”
“We are ‘lean Democrat’, but only by the barest of margins,” Kanagasooriam told POLITICO. “Even a polling error a third of the size seen in 2016 and 2020 would put Trump back in the White House.”
MRP — which stands for “multilevel regression and post-stratification” — is a statistical model that pollsters use to estimate state-level election results. It takes a massive nationwide sample and then uses demographic data to estimate seat or state-level outcomes.
The method — which gained the moniker of “mega poll” — burst onto the scene in the U.K. in 2017 by correctly predicting Prime Minister Theresa May would lose her majority in Parliament at a time when most polls suggested she would win big.
At this year’s general election in the U.K., MRP surveys also dominated the polling coverage, with many predicting that Keir Starmer’s Labour would win a huge victory and the Conservatives would crash to a historic defeat. Even so, the MRP projections in the U.K. were mixed, with some a long way off the final election results.
Backers of the method say it is likely to be even more effective in the U.S. where there are only 50 states. In Britain, the MRP model needs to produce forecasts for 650 constituencies represented in Westminster’s parliament, a more complicated operation.
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British ‘mega poll’ leans toward Harris victory https://t.co/3ZsoQS11Zm
— POLITICO (@politico) November 3, 2024
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