For a second straight presidential election, most professional pollsters dramatically undercounted support for President Donald Trump and Republican Congressional candidates, said three political analysts.

Vice President Joe Biden underperformed the polls substantially in Pennsylvania, Florida, Wisconsin, Ohio, and lots of other places, noted Chris Ellis, associate professor of political science Bucknell University in central Pennsylvania.

“The polling industry is definitely in for some soul-searching after this year,” Ellis said.

Part of the issue in polling, he said, “is that it is harder now than it used to be — people don’t answer their phones anymore, internet polling is still a work in progress, and so on.”

Pollsters have gotten creative in ways to deal with all this, Ellis said, “but it’s clear there’s still work to do. And when you add on the pandemic and the pretty radical changes in how lots of people voted this year, trying to model who was going to vote and who wasn’t was harder than ever. Those are problems to deal with.”

Pollsters did adjust to the problems of 2016, he said, but as always, if you’re trying to solve the last problem, you end up missing the next problem. “And we saw some of these issues — Trump’s strong performance among nonwhite voters, particularly men, I think threw a lot of people off guard.” 

It’s not clear if this is going to be a permanent problem for pollsters in the future, one that they may not be able to figure out how to fix, suggested Robert Speel, associate professor of political science at Penn State.  “Or whether it’s related particularly to Donald Trump and his celebrity status and the devotion he receives from supporters. I sense that many of his supporters get enjoyment out of the anger and discomfort their support for Trump creates.”

If pollsters try to overcompensate in the next election, and it turns out that the misleading poll results of the past were mostly due to Trump’s personality, Speel said, then it’s possible those pollsters will predict large Republican leads that don’t exist in reality. So it’s a difficult problem to solve. 

“There isn’t any doubt that Trump’s supporters really came out strong,” said G. Terry Madonna, director of the Franklin and Marshall College Poll. “A lot of people looked at Trump’s rallies and dismissed them. I think they jacked up the enthusiasm of Trump’s base. He creates excitement among a certain group of voters — his base. But the Trump campaign did something else this cycle: they reached out to people who fit the profile of the Trump voter, the demographics that focused on jobs, education. They went after people who didn’t vote four years ago, but still fit that profile.”

Madonna’s final 2016 poll had Hillary Clinton up 11 points; Trump won Pennsylvania by less than 1 percent. Last week’s final Franklin & Marshall poll had Biden up 6.

“Trump’s support in many of Pennsylvania’s counties was larger than some of the polls had them winning by,” Madonna said. “But we have to wait until the mail-ins are counted. It’s hard to generalize about something until the election is over.”