‘Congrats to the Pollsters!’ Nate Silver Says FiveThirtyEight’s Analysis Shows Polls Had ‘Most Accurate Cycle Ever’ in 2021-2022
Tanya Moutzalias/The Ann Arbor News-MLive.com Detroit via AP
FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver offered a congratulatory message to America’s political pollsters Friday, tweeting that polls had seen their “most accurate cycle ever” in the 2022 election cycle.
As Silver tweeted, FiveThirtyEight conducted a nationwide rating of the pollsters’ performance and found that they had a very good year, tied with 2004 for accuracy.
He also dismissed criticism that the polls had some sort of Republican bias — a common charge after the much-predicted “Red Wave” in the midterms failed to materialize, and argued instead that there was a slight Democratic bias but it was “close enough to zero” that he felt it was fair to say the polling was unbiased overall.
“I guess there’s not really a nice way to put this, but a lot of people aren’t interested in accuracy and just want narratives and vibes,” Silver added in another tweet. “They’re wrong about how the polls did in 2022, but then again they’re wrong about most things. The polls did great & congrats to the pollsters!”
“The Polls Nailed the 2022 Election,” says a headline on FiveThirtyEight, offering this cheering for the industry overall:
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.
A list of all the pollsters in the FiveThirtyEight analysis is on their website here. Siena College/New York Times and SurveyUSA were among those able to boast an A+ rating, and ABC News/Washington Post scored an A. A longer discussion of which pollsters can be trusted is posted here, with a deeper dive into their analytical methods.
