From the WaPo: “Democratic voters and activists find themselves in an odd position less than three weeks before elections that they have been anticipating since Donald Trump won the presidency two years ago. They are eagerly consuming each new poll showing their candidates ahead in races in heavily conservative states spanning Texas, Kansas and Alaska, while simultaneously racked with anxiety that these polls — like ones they dared to believe in the past — could be leading them astray. …

“The difficulty of modeling what voters will turn out on Election Day injects uncertainty into the polling process. Polls overestimated Democratic support in the past three presidential election cycles by three to five percentage points, while election surveys were relatively accurate in Trump’s first midterms in 2018 and President Joe Biden’s midterms in 2022, with systematic error less than one point.

“Pollsters of both parties have largely defended their methodology this time around, though, and believe they are not facing an epidemic of “quiet” Trump supporters who are under-sampled in polls, which some believe was an issue in the accuracy of 2016 polling.”

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