Why election polls were so wrong in 2016 and 2020 — and what's changing to fix that

Pollsters have made several major miscalculations over the past several election cycles, often underestimating support for Donald Trump .

Voters fill out their ballots on January 23, 2024 in Loudon, New Hampshire. With Florida Governor Ron DeSantis dropping out of the race two days earlier, Republican presidential candidates former President Donald Trump and former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley are battling it out in this first-in-the-nation primary.Atkeson, a political scientist who researches election surveys and public opinion, has been conducting voter polls since 2004.

"People were not answering their phones," Rachael Cobb, a political science professor at Suffolk University, told CNBC. "Even in the last 10 years, you might try 20 callers to get the one that you need. Now, it's double: 40 callers to get what you need. So every poll takes longer and it's more expensive."

And some voters were shy about their support for Trump due to his controversial rhetoric during the 2016 campaign. As a result, they did not always admit their voting intentions to pollsters."People didn't factor in educational representation," said Matin Mirramezani, chief operating officer at Generation Lab, a polling organization that specifically targets young voters. "Education is a lesson learned from 2016.

For one, pollsters have adjusted their approach to "weighting," a method that assigns a multiplier to each respondent to change how much their answer sways the overall poll outcome. "You just start tagging to everything you can," Atkeson said. "Anything that can tell us, 'Well, what does the population really look like?'"

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