00:00Democrats are heading into the U.S. midterm elections with a polling lead,
00:04but questions remain over whether that advantage will translate into seats.
00:09A Reuters-Ipsos poll puts Democrats nine percentage points ahead of Republicans, among likely voters.
00:16But a national lead does not guarantee victory.
00:19Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Kamala Harris in 2024 both led in national polling averages before losing to Donald Trump.
00:30Polling researcher Debra Leiter says the growing reluctance to answer phone calls
00:34and the difficulty of reaching certain groups of voters have made random sampling less reliable.
00:39But I think the biggest concern is people who don't trust polls but are still high-propensity voters.
00:45That's, I think, the biggest concerning population.
00:47We know that they are skeptical of government, they are skeptical of political elites, but they are showing up to
00:53vote.
00:54Often these are voters that are very appealed to with populist messaging.
00:59Often they express high levels of political discontent.
01:02They vote against incumbents.
01:04They vote against anyone they perceive them as elites.
01:07And that's an important part of the electorate.
01:08It's not huge, but it matters.
01:10And as elections get closer and closer, as they have been over the last decade or so,
01:15missing an important part of the population misses part of that story.
01:19Due to the situation, she said pollsters are exploring alternative methods,
01:23including citizen forecasting, which asks people who they think will win rather than who they plan to vote for.
01:29And in the same way that if you ask voters, not just who they're going to vote for, but who
01:34they think is going to win,
01:34they're going to take into account their own preferences.
01:37They're going to take into account their friends' preferences.
01:39They're going to take into account their political history, how well things are going,
01:42the ads that they've seen, the polls that they are individually taking in all this information that we know matters.
01:49And then we add them all together and take an average.
01:52Therefore, in an effort to overcome gaps in polling data,
01:55Later said pollsters have also turned to AI, using large language models to construct synthetic voters.
02:01However, Later said the misuse of AI, such as people allowing AI bots to answer surveys on their behalf,
02:07could wind up undermining the accuracy of poll data.
02:09Thank you very much.
