In the aftermath of the U.S. election – and the deeply contentious second coming of President-elect Donald Trump – news organizations, pundits and voters alike have turned to a time-honored tradition to make sense of the results: scrutinizing pre-election polls.
Were the polls accurate? Did they underestimate Trump’s support (again)? And can we learn anything important about voters, and the state of the nation, from poll results in light of Trump’s win?
In Minnesota, the answers seem to be yes, no and sort of.
“Whatever you might think of the election outcomes, overall, and especially here in Minnesota, there’s kind of a win for pollsters this year,” said Craig Helmstetter, managing partner of the APM Research Lab, which regularly works with Minnesota Public Radio.
Helmstetter helped analyze the mid-September MPR News/Minnesota Star Tribune/KARE11 poll that showed Vice President Kamala Harris with a 5 percentage point lead on Trump in Minnesota.
MinnPost’s mid-October poll showed Harris leading by 3 points, while a late-October KSTP poll placed her 8 percentage points ahead of Trump. MPR’s polling averages (which Helmstetter worked on) had Harris winning by 6.5 points.
Still, tracking public opinion is not an exact science. The results for each poll had a margin of error, ranging from plus or minus 4 points in the KSTP survey, to MinnPost’s 2.4-point margin.
That meant Harris could be even further ahead of Trump on Election Day – or that she could fall behind and lose the state by a narrow margin.
In the end, Harris won Minnesota by just over 4 percentage points. To Helmstetter, that shows a healthy, but still accurate, variation in pre-election polls – unlike the concerningly identical results in swing states.
It’s also a sign that pollsters may win back the trust they lost in 2016 when Trump beat Hillary Clinton, who was widely projected to win the presidency.
“There was a lot of research done as to why the polls seemed so far off that year,” Helmstetter said.
“A big thing had to do with whether polls were adequately capturing people, especially people who did not have college educations,” he said. “That’s one improvement that was made, and has borne out, over the past several years.”
At the same time, newer online polling methods have matured, bolstering accuracy in the digital age.
For example, MinnPost’s poll, conducted by Embold Research, reached Minnesotans by texting phone numbers from their public voter files and through targeted advertising on Facebook and Instagram.
Meanwhile, the MPR/Star Tribune/KARE11 poll called voters (the old-school method), while the KSTP poll used an online panel.
“They’re very different methodologies, but it’s nice, from the research point of view, when you can have people coming at a problem from a couple of different ways and still coming up with fairly similar answers,” Helmstetter said.
Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who is the most partisan of all?
Like voters in the rest of the country, Minnesotans largely said they feel the economy is bad, and that the U.S. is on the wrong track.
But perhaps the biggest takeaway from the polling is how partisan voters have become. That’s led to some convoluted results.
In MinnPost’s October poll, voters were asked if they felt their income was going up faster than the cost of living, keeping up, or falling behind.
“Republicans overwhelmingly say that their income is falling behind the cost of living, whereas Democrats are kind of split between staying even and falling behind,” said Ben Greenfield, a lead analyst at Embold Research who worked on MinnPost’s polling.
“Presumably, Democrats are not actually doing much better financially than Republicans across the state,” he said.
That echoes a well-established trend: When there is a Democratic president, Republicans rate the national economy poorly while Democrats rate it well, and vice versa – regardless of actual economic indicators.
But those national feelings don’t entirely match up with what voters think about their local situation. In MinnPost’s polling, just 28% of Minnesotans said the country is on the right track. By comparison, almost 50% of voters think the state is on the right track.
“This is a trend that we see in a lot of different parts of the country, which is that, the more local that you go, the happier people are with the way things are going,” Greenfield said.
The local-national split was visible in the election results. Sen. Amy Klobuchar and Rep. Angie Craig, both Democrats, were reelected by margins of roughly 16 and 13 percentage points, respectively – well ahead of Harris’ margin over Trump.
To understand a voter
These divisions in voter opinion, driven by a hyper-partisan media environment, are a conundrum for pollsters. How to make sense of conflicting results that seem, at times, disconnected from reality? And what truly is the economic reality for voters?
Maybe the answers can’t be found in the polls. There’s plenty that voters either don’t know, or can’t explain.
“We understand our personal budgets,” said Jane Sumner, a political economist and professor at the University of Minnesota. “People have a much more accurate sense of how their local economies are.”
But the national economy is more complicated. There are many different indicators that can move in opposite ways.
Yes, inflation is down, the stock market is at record highs and unemployment is low. But that doesn’t negate sky-high housing and health insurance costs – or the fact that, for several years, inflation did rapidly increase and prices are still high.
“People are looking at all of these different indicators that are reported in the news, and I think it’s hard for anyone to get a clear picture of what they mean,” Sumner said.
Even at a local level, voters might over-emphasize one issue that, in reality, is part of a wider mosaic of problems.
For example, in pre-election polling, Minnesota voters said illegal immigration is a serious issue, second only to concerns about the economy.
Sumner pointed to research by Nicole Wu, a political science professor at the University of Toronto, that shows that people offload anxiety about losing their jobs to automation by blaming immigration instead.
“So people might actually be feeling economic anxiety because their jobs are threatened due to AI, due to automated production,” Sumner said. “But it’s easier for politicians to point to immigrants and say, no, they’re taking your jobs, or to point to other countries and say no, the issue is all the offshoring to China.”
As pollsters grapple with how to understand these nuances of voter opinion, Sumner isn’t sure they’ll be successful. Asking more specific questions about the economy may not actually lead to helpful or accurate answers, she said.
“People just know that things don’t feel good. They know that things feel precarious. And that’s true,” Sumner said.
“So I’m not sure if the polling was more granular, that it would actually pick up on any actual signal, versus just noise,” she said. “In a lot of cases, I just don’t think that people have enough information to really know where the [economic] threats are coming from.”
Mind the gaps, me hearties
As pollsters take stock of this election, there’s already a sense of what might change in the future.
Some public opinion will flip. Under Trump, Republicans will start judging the national economy very well, and Democrats will judge it poorly – a matter of when, not if.
“I do expect that the next four years are going to be pretty radically different from the last four years, and I would be surprised if there is not some change in terms of people’s partisan preferences,” Greenfield said.
Election polls might ask more questions about media consumption to better understand the partisan electorate.
But the most important shift may be an increased focus on voters from immigrant communities and communities of color. National election results show that Trump picked up votes from the Latino community, Asian Americans, and to some extent, Black men.
Reliable polling on those communities is scarce in Minnesota. Pre-election polls categorized voter ethnicity either as white or non-white (MinnPost’s polling defined this category as “People of Color” while the MPR/Star Tribune/KARE11 poll used the term “BIPOC”).
When asked why polling lumped so many different groups into the non-white category, Greenfield and Helmstetter, of the APM Research Lab, both said this was a budget issue. There wasn’t enough money allocated to deeply survey individual communities of color, and the priority instead was a broad survey of Minnesota voters.
But in the future, they hope that changes.
“Nationally, there’s a lot of talk about a potential realignment, that more populations of color are gravitating towards the Republican Party…we really don’t have a great grip on that here with the polling that’s been done to date,” Helmstetter said.
In general, pollsters are keeping an open mind as voter trends continue to evolve. Despite the results of this election, and the resounding victory for Republicans nationally, there is no guarantee what the polls will show next.
“Something that we find when we look at things over a broader horizon, is that things that feel like they are moving inexorably in one direction have a tendency to flip,” Greenfield said. “Even when we don’t expect it.”
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(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
