Nate Silver’s outfit does their review of political pollsters. ….
Let’s give a big round of applause to the pollsters. Measuring public opinion is, in many ways, harder than ever — and yet, the polling industry just had one of its most successful election cycles in U.S. history. Despite a loud chorus of naysayers claiming that the polls were either underestimating Democratic support or biased yet again against Republicans, the polls were more accurate in 2022 than in any cycle since at least 1998, with almost no bias toward either party.
Of course, some pollsters were more accurate than others. And today, we’ve updated the FiveThirtyEight pollster ratings to account for each pollster’s performance in the 2022 cycle. Our ratings are letter grades that we assign to each pollster based on historical accuracy and transparency. (You can read exactly how we calculate pollster ratings here.) They’re one of many tools you should use when deciding how much stock to place in a poll….
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Unsurprisingly, the top of the list is generally populated by academic and media-affiliated pollsters that have been trusted names in polling for a long time. But special congratulations are due to Suffolk University and Siena College/The New York Times Upshot, which had the lowest average errors of any pollster that conducted at least five qualifying polls last cycle. As a result, Suffolk’s pollster rating has increased from B+ to A-. Siena College/The New York Times Upshot already had an A+ grade, so it didn’t get a ratings boost. Still, its stellar performance did push it past Selzer & Co. for the distinction of most accurate pollster in America (at least by FiveThirtyEight’s reckoning).
Meanwhile, the bottom of the list features quite a few Republican-affiliated pollsters that systematically overestimated the GOP in 2022: RRH Elections, InsiderAdvantage, co/efficient, Moore Information Group.14 But the most famous of these is probably Trafalgar Group, a pollster whose methods are notoriously opaquebut that played a significant role in shaping the ultimately untrue narrative that a “red wave” was building with its 37 (!) qualifying pre-election polls. Trafalgar’s polls were quite accurate in 2020, when its Republican-leaning house effects helped it avoid the big polling miss that other firms experienced. As a result, it went into 2022 with an A- pollster rating. But its poor performance last cycle has knocked it down to a B — making it the only pollster to fall two notches in our ratings this year.15
Of course, we generate more data on each pollster than just a letter grade. On our pollster-ratings page, you’ll also find the pollster’s historical bias, the number of its polls we’ve analyzed and its Predictive Plus-Minus, which is our projection of how much error we think the pollster will have in future elections relative to the average pollster. (Negative scores mean we believe the pollster will have less error than average.) ….
Note….
Several of the lower rated tier polling outfit have appeared here…..
Rasmussen, RRH , Trafalgar are amoung them….
The popular Real Clear Politics daily listings tend to post the lower end Republican friendy outfits’s polls….