Did the Forecasters Get 2020 Right? Dave Wasserman on Polls, Partisans, and Prediction Philosophy

Dave Wasserman is the House Editor for The Cook Political Report, a nonpartisan polling and elections forecasting group. Before joining The Cook Political Report, Dave worked as the House Editor for another widely respected polling and elections forecasting firm, Sabato’s Crystal Ball. 

 At The Cook Political Report, Wasserman is known as one of the nation’s prominent election forecasters. He successfully forecasted the 2016 and 2018 elections, accurately suggesting that Donald Trump may win the presidency while losing the popular vote. He is actively involved in examining House races, using individual districts to key in on larger electoral trends. He collaborated with FiveThirtyEight to produce the groundbreaking “Atlas of Redistricting,” which models redistricting and gerrymandering scenarios for all fifty states.

It’s a rare opportunity to have a preeminent forecaster like Dave on the show to discuss several important topics just as the elections season came to its long-awaited end. To start, we tackled the 2020 Presidential Election, trying to understand why the polls were off yet again. Dave was quite frank with us, stating that he and other elections forecasters relied too heavily on what he calls “spreadsheet crunching.”

 For reference, The Cook Political Report, as opposed to FiveThirtyEight and The Economist’s elections forecasting team, is a traditional elections forecaster relying on conventional wisdom. With the rise of data-driven forecasting, Dave argues that pollsters lost track of some tried-and-true political knowledge: the strength of incumbents, the ebbs and flows of political trends that caused voters who voted for Congressional Democrats to rebuke Trump in 2018 to split their tickets, and the polling blind spots for the incredible turnout from white, non-college educated voters.

 That is not to say data doesn’t matter at all. We also discussed the data of key demographic shifts — the Democratic Party’s inroads in key suburban areas and their bleeding from the blue-collar union areas that formed the dominant New Deal coalition for much of the 1950s and 1960s. 

In addition, Dave argues that because of the growth of data and accessibility to data in politics, the general public has become more attuned to processes like redistricting and voting rights issues, which may buffer the gerrymandering that will happen due to Republican control of state legislatures.

 However, Dave is quite pessimistic about disinformation, polarization, and their consequences on electoral politics. He’s quite bearish on Democrats’ chances to hold Congress in 2022, even though he feels Georgia and Arizona have shifted favorably for them. He worries about the consequences of the rampant disinformation on the trust in future elections, and while he sees a depolarization across race and geography in the country, he sees disinformation and irresponsible practices from Beltway media as means of worsening the divide between urban and rural America.

 In our interview, we give an unfiltered look at the state of electoral democracy on both the micro and macro levels with one of the nation’s premier forecasters. For more of our previous discussions on election forecasting, you may be interested in listening to the episode “Is Nate Silver Worse than Crackhead Jim? The Success and Tautology of Election Forecasting” and read our essay on Bayesian forecasting in elections. 

Dave Wasserman