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2020 House · IA-4

Change Research · fieldwork ended 2020-10-14 (20 days before the election) · 603 respondents · Text-to-Web/Online Ad · partisan sponsor (DEM)

The poll said

Democrat 45% · Republican 50%

R+5.0

The certified result

Democrat 37.79% · Republican 61.97%

R+24.2

The arithmetic

  1. Poll margin = 45 − 50 = -5.00
  2. Actual margin = 37.794 − 61.973 = -24.179
  3. Signed miss = -5.00 − (-24.179) = 19.178
  4. Absolute miss = |19.178| = 19.178

The poll overstated the Democrat by 19.2 points and had the right leader.

Where these numbers come from

Poll and result: 538 raw_polls.csv. Poll ID 71534, race ID 7991 (538 database).