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Description
The Trafalgar Group is an opinion polling and survey company founded by Robert Cahaly and based in Atlanta, Georgia. It first publicly released polls in 2016, and it successfully predicted the result of the 2016 presidential election. Trafalgar Group incorrectly predicted the 2020 presidential election results, but was rated the second most accurate pollster on the election by FiveThirtyEight.
Method
Trafalgar Group adjusts its polls for a "social desirability bias" effect, the hypothesized tendency of some voters to calibrate their responses to polls towards what they believe the survey taker would like to hear. It does this by not only asking respondents how they plan to vote, but also how they think their neighbors might vote. Former Democratic Party strategist Ed Kilgore, in New York Magazine in July 2020, criticized Trafalgar's approach, writing, "The Shy Trump Voter may not be entirely a myth, but they're not numerous enough to fill a Trump rally, much less change an election result or rebut a poll." Responding to criticism of Trafalgar's polling methods and its lack of transparency about its methods, Cahaly said in November 2020, "I think we’ve developed something that’s very different from what other people do, and I really am not interested in telling people how we do it. Just judge us by whether we get it right."
In presidential polling, Trafalgar Group only conducts state-level polls; according to Cahaly, "we don't do national polls, and that's for the same reason I don't keep up with hits in a baseball game: It's an irrelevant statistic".
Before the 2020 election, FiveThirtyEight gave Trafalgar a grade of C−. As of April 2021, FiveThirtyEight gave Trafalgar a grade of A−.
According to The New York Times, there is almost no explanation of the Trafalgar Group's methodology: "the methods page on Trafalgar's website contains what reads like a vague advertisement of its services and explains that its polls actively confront social desirability bias, without giving specifics as to how."
