11-10-20 marquette poll director responds to presidential polls

The director of the Marquette Law School poll says the challenge in getting some Trump supporters to participate in polls makes it a difficult to come up with an accurate poll.   Just like 2016, polls across the country generally missed the mark on this year’s presidential race.   The final Marquette poll was off by four points, within the margin of error.   Poll director Charles Franklin says the problem is the poll is systematically missing some Trump voters who refuse to do telephone interviews.  Franklin says following the 2016 election changes to the polling cut the poll’s  error rate  on Trump about in half this year.  “In our final poll when we pushed people  who we thought they would vote for we had Biden at 50 (percent) and he actually got 49.9 (percent) so we’re just barely off on him but we were 3.9 points too low on Trump,”  Franklin told AM 1170s Between the Lines program.   “The good news is we did a lot better than we did four years ago when we were really badly wrong, but we have still not found a way to reach the full segment of the Trump electorate.”   “It also is apparently true of Republican and Democratic campaign pollsters.  They were also off about as much as the public polls were.”   Franklin says other polls in the past have been accurate, including the 2018 gubenatorial race between Scott Walker and Tony Evers for example.