Don't write the AfD off yet

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Jörg Meuthen, Head of the Afd - bigger than you think? © Robin Krahl

Once again, US pollsters failed to pick up the “shy Trump supporters” at a presidential election. Polling predicted a comfortable victory for Democrat Joe Biden. But when it came to the crunch, he only won by a whisker.

It's a phenomenon we’ve seen on this side of the Atlantic in recent years. In the UK, polling has twice failed to detect comfortable Tory victories.

In Germany, all but one of the eight polling firms underestimated the Alternative for Germany’s (AfD) share of the vote at the last federal election in 2017. Most had the far-right party polling in the single digits throughout the year. They ended up with the third largest faction in the Bundestag on the back of 12.6 percent of the vote.

That wasn’t an isolated malfunction. At state elections between 2016 and 2018, pollsters consistently underpredicted their popularity. The explanation is likely similar to that in the US. A mixture of inflammatory rhetoric fr…