Pollster says he ‘blew it’ on New Jersey governor’s race

Polling was so off-base for the New Jersey governor’s race that one prominent pollster is questioning whether political horserace polling should continue. 

Monmouth University Poll director Patrick Murray wrote a column Thursday for NJ.com that started out with the phrase: ‘I blew it.’ 

‘The final Monmouth University Poll margin did not provide an accurate picture of the state of the governor’s race,’ Murray said. ‘So, if you are a Republican who believes the polls cost Ciattarelli an upset victory or a Democrat who feels we lulled your base into complacency, feel free to vent. I hear you.’

The final Monmouth survey had Democratic incumbent Gov. Phil Murphy running 11 points ahead of Republican Jack Ciattarelli. 

Other late-in-the-race polls, including Trafalgar Group and Fairleigh Dickinson University also showed the Democrat ahead by a healthy margin. 

Traflagar had Murphy ahead by four points, while Fairleigh Dickinson University had him ahead by nine. 

The final Real Clear Politics polling average showed Murphy 7.8 points ahead. 

The actual spread between the two candidates: just 2.3  per cent.  

‘I owe an apology to Jack Ciattarelli’s campaign – and to Phil Murphy’s campaign for that matter – because inaccurate public polling can have an impact on fundraising and voter mobilization efforts,’ Murray said in his column. ‘But most of all I owe an apology to the voters of New Jersey for information that was at the very least misleading.’

Murray said there had been signs that Murphy was in trouble – the fact that he was only polling at around 50 per cent – but that wasn’t emphasized as what looked to be his lead in the race.  

Murray wrote that ‘More than one astute observer of polls has pointed out that the incumbent was consistently polling at either 50% or 51% against a largely unknown challenger.’ 

‘That metric in itself should have been an indication of Murphy’s underlying weakness as an incumbent,’ he noted. ‘Still, in the age of polling aggregators, needles, and election betting markets, we tend to obsess more on the margin than on the candidate’s vote share.’   

Murray questioned whether horserace political polling should continue because pollsters have to try to guess the electorate.  

‘The difference between public interest polls and election polls is that the latter violates the basic principles of survey sampling,’ he said. 

‘For an election poll, we do not know exactly who will vote until after Election Day, so we have to create models of what we think the electorate could look like,’ he explained. ‘Those models are not perfect. They classify a sizable number of people who do not cast ballots as “likely voters” and others who actually do turn out as being “unlikely.”‘ 

‘These models have tended to work, though, because the errors balance out into a reasonable projection of what the overall electorate eventually looks like,’ he continued. 

Murray also pointed out that a number of prominent polling companies have pulled out of doing election polling, such as Gallup and Pew. Quinnipiac, which previously polled the New Jersey and Virginia off-year races, didn’t put a poll out in the field this year.   

‘If we cannot be certain that these polling misses are anomalies then we have a responsibility to consider whether releasing horse race numbers in close proximity to an election is making a positive or negative contribution to the political discourse,’ Murray said.