Most preelection polls in 2020 overstated Joe Biden’s lead over Donald Trump in the national vote for president, and in some states incorrectly indicated that Biden would likely win or that the race would be close when it was not. These opinions were examined to see how they differed between the two scenarios. Questions in these surveys measured opinions on issues such as health care, the proper scope of government, immigration, race, and the nation’s response to the coronavirus pandemic. For this analysis, we used several surveys conducted in 2020 with more than 10,000 members of Pew Research Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP), an online survey panel that is recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses that ensures that nearly all U.S. One scenario mirrored the true election outcome among voters (a 4.4-point Biden advantage, and another substantially overstated Biden’s advantage (a 12-point lead). Specifically, if polls about issues are underrepresenting the Republican base the way that many 2020 preelection polls appeared to, how inaccurate would they be on measures of public opinion about issues? We investigated by taking a set of surveys that measured a wide range of issue attitudes and using a statistical procedure known as weighting to have them mirror two different scenarios. Pew Research Center conducted this study to understand how errors in correctly representing the level of support for Joe Biden and Donald Trump in preelection polling could affect the accuracy of questions in those same polls (or other polls) that measure public opinion on issues.
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