Change Research is not about following the herd.

Close followers of polling know the concept of herding: most pollsters want to stay in line with others and are reluctant to surface a result far from the pack. The herding pollster fudges their weighting and sampling to align with the polling consensus.

Imagine a race where 10 recent polls show the Democrat between 5 and 10 points ahead. The herding pollster runs a poll showing the Democrat leading by 15. Afraid to leave the herd, the pollster keeps this result to himself, instead changing his or her assumptions to yield a result showing the Democrat leading by 9. He or she releases the D+9 number that fits in with the crowd.

Change Research is different, and we aren’t afraid to release results that differ from other polls.

Last year, the RealClearPolitics average in the Florida Democratic Primary for Governor showed Andrew Gillum in fourth place, fourteen points behind Gwen Graham. Our final poll for the Gillum campaign showed something different:

Change Research did not run with the herd in Florida.

In Chicago’s mayoral election in February, other polls showed Bill Daley or Toni Preckwinkle leading the field; only our two polls (one for Jerry Joyce and one for 270 Strategies) showed Lori Lightfoot leading. Again, Change did not follow the herd, and again, Change wound up being most accurate.

In the 2020 Democratic Presidential Primary, almost all polling shows Joe Biden with a significant lead. Our polling has differed substantially from other public polls, showing Biden in a weaker position, and Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg often in stronger positions. Again, we are not afraid to part from the polling herd.

Wait, But Why?

Some of our recent polls have drawn scrutiny for straying from the herd. Specifically, our polls have frequently shown Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg in stronger positions than other polls, while showing Joe Biden in a weaker position.

We believe in our numbers in large part because we’re always poking holes at them to look for errors. Recently, ActBlue released data on over 2 million people who have donated to Democratic presidential campaigns. By matching ActBlue data to our polling data, we found that we’ve polled over 3000 of those donors on their preferred Democratic candidate for president.

Because Joe Biden has frequently polled lower in our polls than in most other polls, we wanted to ask ourselves the question: Are we polling fewer Biden supporters than we should be? Thanks to the ActBlue data set, we were able to ask it quantitatively, seeing if a smaller percentage of Biden donors were taking our surveys than, say, Elizabeth Warren or Kamala Harris donors.

Here’s what we found:

Across our Democratic primary polls, 0.268% of Joe Biden donors have been polled by Change Research — a percentage higher than that of all other candidates on this list except Julian Castro. In other words, it’s likely Change Research’s polls have oversampled donors of Joe Biden — if anything, suggesting we may be overstating his level of support.

Meanwhile, Pete Buttigieg and Elizabeth Warren donors have been slightly less likely to take our polls than the average donor to a Democratic presidential candidate. If anything, we may be undercounting the support for Warren and Buttigieg (as well as Andrew Yang, Bernie Sanders, and Kamala Harris), while overcounting support for Biden, Castro, Cory Booker, and Beto O’Rourke.

We haven’t seen any other pollsters run this analysis, and we’d suggest doing so; we would not be surprised if other polls are significantly more likely to survey Biden donors than Warren or Buttigieg donors.

We’ll note one other methodological difference: because we’re gauging support of voters’ top five candidates, we force respondents to choose candidates, not offering an “undecided” option. Our data suggest that giving an undecided option would hurt Warren and Buttigieg more than Biden or Sanders.

To learn more about our methodology and accuracy, click here.