"Been seeing youth voter turnout increase": Election results show polling predictions got it wrong
DAVIS — The votes are in for the 2022 midterms. Results show some expected victories and surprises, but one thing is for sure: the results don't reflect the polling predictions.
Though Republicans are likely to take control of the U.S. House of Representatives, the Senate has yet to be decided. That's the opposite of what pollsters anticipated.
"Look at Florida. Desantis by 20 points. He won that race. No poll predicted that," said CBS13 political analyst Gary Dietrich.
Dietrich explained that the gap between polling data and election results is significant, in part, because pollsters didn't count youth.
"One of the challenges of polling right now is [that] in the past, it was all done the same way. You got someone on their hard-line and they answered questions. The challenge right now is how do you capture across generations," said Dietrich.
Young people played a major role in this year's election, according to early exit-polling data from Tisch College Center for Information and Learning at Tufts University.
Around 27% of young people between 18-29 voted, making it the second-highest youth voter turnout in almost three decades. For the U.S. House of Representatives, 63% voted Democrat while 35% voted Republican.
Dietrich said millennials and Generation Z likely weren't counted by pollsters – but why?
We spoke to the Organizing director for the advocacy organization CALPIRG students Veronika Michels –
"We've been seeing youth voter turnout increase," said Veronika Michels, the organizing director for CALPIRG. "A lot of them are first-time voters. They just might not be on the list of likely voters pollsters are reaching out to."
Michels' second theory for why voter turnout didn't match polling data is simple: "Mostly, polls happen over the phone and young people don't answer the phone."
"It might be helpful to think of other creative ways to reach out to young people," Michels added. "Utilizing campus resources, getting emails out to students through campus emails, texting and social media are the other places people look."
CALPIRG has several chapters at UC schools across the state. They tell us they registered 3,500 new voters prior to the midterms and made over 17,000 reminder contacts with students relying mostly on peer-to-peer contact and communication from professors.