We’re one week away from the 2022 midterm elections, and predicting individual results based on your preferred pollster is still a fool’s errand. CivicScience has never been in the business of horse race polling – and that isn’t about to change – but we’re always tracking Americans’ sentiments toward political polls themselves.
Although the 2020 election and its aftermath further polarized the country, Americans are roughly as confident in political polls as they were in the summer of 2019 – which is to say, not very confident at all. Even with that previous study, nearly two-thirds of adults are ‘not at all confident’ in the results of political polls. Slightly more claim to be ‘very confident’ in the polls, but the baseline distrust hasn’t budged.
Roughly the same percentage of Americans (1-in-10) owned up to answering a political poll or survey dishonestly as in 2019. But there’s been a sizable uptick in adults who don’t answer political polls at all since before the 2020 election. The ever-desirable Independents, who pollsters must thoroughly rely on for accurate results, are perhaps inconveniently more likely than the Gen Pop to answer dishonestly (13%) or not answer at all (29%).
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