How Will the Election Affect the Polling Industry?
Poll-watchers expected a solid presidential win for Hillary Clinton in 2016. When Donald Trump won, pollsters wondered what happened, why pre-election polls showed the Democratic candidate ahead in battleground states and are now questioning whether it could happen again in 2020.
Ashley Koning, director of Rutgers University’s Eagleton Center for Public Interest Polling (ECPIP), discusses the high stakes for the polling industry in the latest installment of “What Happens Next Election Edition,” produced by Rutgers University-New Brunswick.
“This is a do-or-die election cycle in terms of how the public will perceive and trust the polling industry. Pollsters have learned a lot from the surprise of 2016. For example, their statistical analyses now account for the education of those being polled, after having missed the attitudes of non-college educated white voters four years ago,” said Koning, an assistant research professor and director of the polling center, which is a unit of Rutgers University-New Brunswick’s Eagleton Institute of Politics.
You can view the “What Happens Next” conversation with Koning on Rutgers University-New Brunswick’s Facebook page. It is part of a series of interviews with Rutgers faculty on how the election will affect matters of national interest.
