Worst polled state in the nation, always overstating the Democrat to absurd degree. I've emphasized it here since 2002. Nate Silver finally caught on with a lengthy article in 2014. Somehow he wrote nobody every seems to mention the misses always go in the same direction. Okay, Nate.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/senate-update-alaska-a-frontier-for-bad-polling/
"As other commentators have noted, Alaska is a hard state to poll accurately. What we haven’t seen remarked upon is how those misses have come in one direction, almost always overestimating the performance of Democrats.
"In every single race, the polls have shown a Democratic bias. In 2008, for instance, Begich was favored by almost 10 percentage points in the polls against the Republican incumbent Ted Stevens, but won by barely more than a percentage point. Also that year, the polls favored the Democrat Ethan Berkowitz to win the state’s at-large House district from the Republican incumbent Don Young, but Young prevailed instead. In 2004, the polls had the Democrat Tony Knowles, the state’s former governor, tied in his race against Murkowski, but Murkowski won by three points. In 2010, the Republican gubernatorial candidate Sean Parnell by a margin much larger than the polls anticipated. On average since 1998, polls of Alaska have had a 7-point bias toward Democrats."
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That 7 point bias held up in 2016 also.
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/alaska/
Nate gave Hillary a 23.5% chance to carry Alaska. It should have been more like .235% chance. His model had Trump leading by 7.4 points. Trump carried the state by 14.7 points.
IMO, one of the reasons the polling misses so badly is that Alaska has higher percentage males than any state in the country. It is the only state that consistently has more males in the electorate. No doubt those conservative males in Alaska either aren't found by pollsters or aren't honest with them or are underrepresented in the model.
It really should be impossible for polling to be so consistently inept in the same direction. But I don't mind taking advantage as a gambler. Alaska wagering has been cupcakes.
BTW, Nate with the 1998 reference did not go back far enough. I discovered the Alaska polling bias when I began wagering on politics in 1992. The lousy polling was blatant as far back as the '80s.
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