For 32 years, the Quinnipiac Poll has been supplying the nation with polling data on public policy issues and elections. Heading into the 2024 presidential election, these polls are as important and analyzed as ever as commentators and the public attempt to find any inkling of which way America will vote Nov. 5.
Doug Schwartz, director of the Quinnipiac Poll, has been leading the charge at the poll since 1994, expanding to a nationwide polling institute in 2001.
But 2024 may be the most challenging year yet when attempting to get a political snapshot of the country.
“We reflect the news, we don’t try to influence public opinion,” Schwartz said. “We ask voters what they’re thinking about the campaign and the candidates and who they’re going to vote for but our role is not to influence voters.”
The Quinnipiac Poll had been compiling polling data for months based on what it thought would be a presidential election between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump. But in August 2024, when Biden stepped aside and Vice President Kamala Harris gained the Democratic nomination, plans had to change.
“The first thing that comes to mind in terms of unique challenges is that this is such a short window for one of the major parties to select a new nominee,” Schwartz said. “The fact that Harris became the Democratic nominee in August, that’s never happened before. And you know, there were a substantial number of people who really didn’t know her very well.”
The presidential election’s historic shakeup in August isn’t even the biggest challenge for the poll — it’s getting people to pick up the phone.
“As far as reaching people, it’s a challenge. It has been for many years,” Schwartz said. “One of the good parts about polling during an election is that historically, more people want to participate in the poll. So it’s just more exciting. People are more interested in, let’s say in September and October and so for response rates, even though they’re still low, they’re better than they typically are.”
Even when a caller picks up the phone, that doesn’t mean they are ready to spill their political views with the person on the other end of the line.
“I’ve had days where I just dialed and dialed and dialed and got no surveys,” said Dawn Bacote, a Quinnipiac University Polling Institute caller in an interview with NBC News.
For the 2022 midterm elections, the poll redesigned how it asks questions and saw one of its most accurate polling cycles ever.
“We decided to refine how we asked the question about, who are you going to vote for?,” Schwartz said. “So now we have what we call the stronger follow up. So if people don’t give us an answer, we reworded our follow up question to make it a little bit stronger. So we say, ‘If you had to choose, which way do you lean.’”
Another key target for the poll is getting the views of registered voters. When asked, most people say they are going to vote, but they never actually do. Schwartz and the poll’s job is to find that happy medium.
“Not everyone does vote. Many people don’t,” Swartz said. “So the art of it is, how do you actually get who’s really going to vote? And every pollster does it differently, and that’s why I call it an art. There’s no one right way of doing it.”
Once the poll can collect and publish the data, the media runs wild with it, sometimes being too quick to point to assumptions. It’s something to take into account when most polls have the upcoming election within just a few points — well within the margin of error.
“A lot of times in the media, they ignore the margin of error, they don’t take it into account,” Schwartz said. “I think that’s misleading for the public. The commentators, they just ignore the margin of error and say, ‘Oh, this candidate is leading this other candidate by one point or two points,’ even though it’s statistically insignificant.”
NBC News analyst Steve Kornacki, famously known for dissecting polling data on national television, discussed how hard it was to break down a poll during an installment of Quinnipiac’s Critical Conversation Speaker Series Oct. 7.
“In terms of data, we can look at the polling that’s out there, but in a poll of 1000 people or something, there’s only so much you can kind of slice and dice what you’re getting,” Kornacki said.
Over the past months, Schwartz has been up close and personal in the polling process, and with this being the sixth presidential election since the poll went nationwide, he’s seeing some key trends to look out for Nov. 5.
“One of the things that I found interesting, not just about our poll, but a lot of other polls, is that you’re seeing more young people voting for the Republican candidate Donald Trump than historically have voted for the Republican candidate,” Schwartz said. “You’re seeing more black and Hispanic voters voting for Donald Trump than they have historically voted for the Republican candidate.”
That said, these are only trends, whether they prove to be leaning in the correct path will largely depend on voter turnout.
“Are we going to see some sort of major shift in party allegiance among young people and black Hispanic voters?,” Schwartz said. “I’m really curious. It also could end up being that you see lower turnout among these groups. So I’m kind of curious to see what happens on election day.”
