How accurate, or off-target, could the polls be this year? - The Boston Globe

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

56% : In 2016 and 2020, nearly all of the state-level polling averages underestimated support for Trump, sometimes by a wide margin.
56% : Should you, as some poll watchers claim to do, mentally add a boost for Trump to any poll numbers you see? Pollsters believe they have largely identified what caused the polling misses in 2016.
56% : Polling in seven swing states is extremely close; in most of these states, Trump and Kamala Harris are essentially tied.
37% : But if pollsters underestimated Trump in the last two elections, are they doomed to do so again this year?
33% : But polls still underestimated Trump.
32% : "There's a real possibility that having Trump on the ballot makes it hard to poll for whatever reason," said Berwood Yost, the director of the Franklin & Marshall College Poll of Pennsylvania.
29% : In fact, they were divided between Biden and Trump, according to the Pew study.
29% : But one key difference between the midterms and the last two presidential elections is that Trump was not on the ballot.

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