understate

“I’m interested to see what we can glean from information about what polling organizations did to produce their estimates and whether and how this impacted their results and performance, which also might help us understand the tendency to understate Trump vote shares,” Wlezien said.

Overall, Barker believes a number of possible factors could cause the 2024 polls to understate Democratic support, foremost among them the desire to overcorrect from understating Republican support in the last two cycles.

This is not to say that there are not also factors which could understate the level of support for Trump for a third consecutive cycle.

"They likely understate the actual threats. Nevertheless, time and time again, warnings of possible or even likely future events and risks typically bring only limited responses and even insurance is not taken out. The nearer term local and regional issues are always of bigger concern. Only when one adopts a longer term, 10 to 20 year perspective, does one's values and perceptions change."

The first is that these figures come from government surveys and they understate the number of people receiving pension credit by about 300,000 compared with the DWP's separate publication showing the number of actual claimants.