Polls in several key states underestimated the breadth of support for President Trump before the Nov. 3 election, just as they did in 2016.
But why?
Early results from a study by researchers at the University of Southern California indicate that pollsters may not have captured support for Mr. Trump among followers of the QAnon conspiracy theory that has spread widely on Twitter and other social networks in recent months.
The researchers identified a strong statistical correlation between state polls that underestimated Mr. Trump’s chances and a higher-than-average volume of QAnon activity in those states, including Wisconsin, Michigan and Ohio.
“The higher the support for QAnon in each state, the more the polls underestimated the support for Trump,” said Emilio Ferrara, the University of Southern California professor who is overseeing the study.
The study draws on an analysis of more than 240 million election-related tweets from June through September, which included widespread activity involving QAnon, a conspiracy theory that falsely claims that President Trump is facing down a shadowy cabal of Democratic pedophiles. The researchers then compared this data to election predictions made by the popular website FiveThirtyEight.com.
Mr. Ferrara suggests that QAnon believers were not properly captured by the polls because such conspiracy theorists tend to distrust mainstream media organizations like FiveThirtyEight or The New York Times. “If you distrust institutions,” he said, “you are less likely to participate in polls.” Participants are typically recruited by phone and in online surveys.
Joshua Dyck, an associate professor of political science and director of the Center for Public Opinion at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, said we still do not have a full picture of how well the polls performed, because many votes are still being counted. But he also said the hypothesis laid down by Dr. Ferrara and his colleagues was entirely plausible, pointing out that such distrust for mainstream media is well documented.
“This is something we can measure and actually adjust for in our surveys,” he said.
Among people who said they “hardly ever” trusted the mainstream media, 78 percent were Trump supporters and only 17 percent supported Mr. Biden, according to a recent nationwide poll by Dr. Dyck and the Center for Public Opinion.
Dr. Dyck said that significant polling errors in states like Wisconsin, Michigan and Ohio may also be related to the coronavirus pandemic. Voters who supported Mr. Biden were more likely to stay at home during the pandemic, which, he said, meant they had more time to respond to polls, either by phone or online.
“Because the pandemic is a politicized issue, the polls may be undercounting Trump supporters,” Dr. Dyck said.
He also said that polling errors could involve all these groups. “The QAnon hypothesis is reasonable. And the Covid hypothesis is reasonable. And they may overlap,” he said. “We may be talking about the same people.”