The Futility of Polls
Political polling isn't an exact science.
In fact, it's far from it.
Because in order to ask everyday citizens about their thoughts and opinions, you have a myriad of things to consider. Who should take the poll? How should they take the poll? How many people do we want to take the poll? How should we introduce the poll so that people don't hang up? Should we call from local telephone numbers or a central hub? How long do we want to keep the poll open? How do we phrase the questions? Who writes the questions? Should we do scaled answers from 1 to 10? 1 to 5? Should we have scaled answers from Strongly Approve to Strongly Disapprove? How do we minimize our margin of error? Should we go all-in on one poll or aim to do another one in 2 weeks? Can we afford to do more than one poll? Once we have our results, which media outlets should we reach out to in order to share our results?
In short, there's a lot to consider.
Political polling is nothing new. In fact, Gallup polls have been around since 1936 when they successfully predicted an FDR victory over Alfred Landon. This made national news because it directly contradicted Literary Digest, which sent out 2 million surveys to its readers and was convinced of a Landon victory. Once Gallup received that recognition, it became the go-to poll in politics, despite the fact that it botched the now-infamous Dewey Defeats Truman election of 1948 with predictions being wildly off between 10 and 20 percent. Rather than own the mistake, Gallup did what all pollsters do: placed blame somewhere else. In this instance, Gallup blamed not taking a single poll the last 3 weeks of the campaign and a late rise by Harry Truman as key factors for their miscalculation. The world of polling escaped and rather than realizing the challenges of the imperfect science built upon creating a public narrative around an unknowable event, Americans were now intrigued about whether or not future Gallup polls would be correct or wrong. To them, it became one giant game.
And unfortunately, this "game" is still in existence over 70 years later. Not only do we still have Gallup, but we have over two dozen polling organizations in the United States alone. The ubiquity of the internet has added a new dimension to polling with new organizations like YouGov now doing solely internet-based polling. However, the biggest problem in polling today is the fact that there are so many organizations and so few ways to present the same findings. The consequence of this is that there now exists a clear bias in these polls and in these polling organizations. Trafalgar Group, based in Atlanta, modeled its entire 2020 presidential polls with the idea that there existed significant "shy, pro-Trump" votes that were being severely undercounted. Trafalgar went on to incorrectly predict all 5 battleground states that ended up voting for Joe Biden and to this day has refused to disclose its polling methods.
As much as we like to mock biased polls that are so clearly wrong, there are real-world consequences when this happens. On August 4th of this year, SurveyUSA, an A-rated poll based in New Jersey, released a poll showing California voters favoring the recall of Gavin Newsom by a shocking 11 points. Three weeks later, SurveyUSA released a follow-up poll that had the recall failing by 8 points and included a note about their incorrect methodology that caused the first shock poll three weeks prior. Their final poll showed no on recall with a 13-point advantage. But the entire political landscape of the Golden State had been changed. California Democrats kicked it into overdrive. Volunteers flocked to the campaign to do virtual campaigning and fundraising. When all was said and done, Newsom had exceeded all polling expectations and won by a rollicking 24 points. Like it or not, polling had been a critical factor in turnout in an off-off year election, and once again we had another Dewey Defeats Truman moment, thanks to faulty polling.
This is part-and-parcel for modern-day polling organizations. They are paid simply to take a snapshot in time. The problem is that those snapshots are then used to drive campaign activity and are used in the narrative around the election in question. Political campaigns often hire their own local polling firms for internal polls to avoid the outside noise of what may very well be a biased external poll. These polls are costly, so it is very unlikely that a challenger has access to a poll and instead must use her or his resources in other, more creative ways. But if a negative poll gets released, that candidate is then responsible for how she or he responds. Sometimes, in the case of Gavin Newsom, it can fire up the base. Other times, a candidate falls victim to one single bad poll and she or he is simply unable to recover. How the candidate responds is a testament to their character.
That is why it is so critical that Democrats and Democratic voters ignore the noise these next 3 years. Polls will wildly fluctuate, especially the approval rating of Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr. Our national media likes nothing better than for a sitting Democratic president to have an unfavorable approval rating and we've already seen them wet themselves during the first 48 hours of the Afghanistan evacuation when they thought they'd have The Fall of Saigon 2.0. With Biden's approval rating temporarily hovering around 43% the news media is now able to craft a narrative about how "unpopular" Joe Biden is as a result of his policies. Remember that TFG's approval rating never got above 49% and yet he still garnered support from over 74 million brain-dead Americans. That, it itself, should tell all of us that if someone with a 34% approval rating can win 47% of the vote then perhaps polls aren't a political death sentence that our media claim them to be.
This is why we shouldn't lose sleep over polls from now on. They're a relic from a bygone era, used solely to create news when none exists. They represented an antiquated method of reaching voters by primarily using landlines rather than cellphones. They require the participants to already be passionate about the subject at hand because why would you waste your time to take a 15-minute survey about something you didn't care about? They base their required respondents on past demographics rather than current ones. They have a built-in margin of error that when doubled actually portrays what could potentially be a 6 to 8 point swing in either direction. The sample size can vary wildly and is often generated by polling only a few hundred voters in states with millions of residents. There's a reason why the 2020 election polls were the least accurate in decades and that reason was that participants themselves felt no need to tell the truth to their pollster. All and all, political polls have become a half-step up from throwing a dart at a dartboard to determine the winner of an election.
None of this will stop polls from being done or our media from reporting them as if they are breaking news. The only solution is to block out the noise. Don't run scared but also don't take anything for granted. Campaign with the goal in mind of absolutely obliterating your political opponent. Volunteer for state and local races in your area. If you have time and resources, volunteer for out-of-state races (hello, Virginia and New Jersey in 1 week!). Polling organizations exist solely to create drama in this day and age. Nobody looks back on a poll that correctly predicted an election result. But that one poll that was way off, well that's huge news and let's try and figure out why that is! We deserve better than that and since we won't get it, it's up to all of us to push forward and simply drown out any controversy that polling organizations will attempt to create over the next 3 years.
And it's up to all of us to vote Democratic with such huge margins that we blow the polls away, making them as meaningless as they've always been.
In fact, it's far from it.
Because in order to ask everyday citizens about their thoughts and opinions, you have a myriad of things to consider. Who should take the poll? How should they take the poll? How many people do we want to take the poll? How should we introduce the poll so that people don't hang up? Should we call from local telephone numbers or a central hub? How long do we want to keep the poll open? How do we phrase the questions? Who writes the questions? Should we do scaled answers from 1 to 10? 1 to 5? Should we have scaled answers from Strongly Approve to Strongly Disapprove? How do we minimize our margin of error? Should we go all-in on one poll or aim to do another one in 2 weeks? Can we afford to do more than one poll? Once we have our results, which media outlets should we reach out to in order to share our results?
In short, there's a lot to consider.
Political polling is nothing new. In fact, Gallup polls have been around since 1936 when they successfully predicted an FDR victory over Alfred Landon. This made national news because it directly contradicted Literary Digest, which sent out 2 million surveys to its readers and was convinced of a Landon victory. Once Gallup received that recognition, it became the go-to poll in politics, despite the fact that it botched the now-infamous Dewey Defeats Truman election of 1948 with predictions being wildly off between 10 and 20 percent. Rather than own the mistake, Gallup did what all pollsters do: placed blame somewhere else. In this instance, Gallup blamed not taking a single poll the last 3 weeks of the campaign and a late rise by Harry Truman as key factors for their miscalculation. The world of polling escaped and rather than realizing the challenges of the imperfect science built upon creating a public narrative around an unknowable event, Americans were now intrigued about whether or not future Gallup polls would be correct or wrong. To them, it became one giant game.
And unfortunately, this "game" is still in existence over 70 years later. Not only do we still have Gallup, but we have over two dozen polling organizations in the United States alone. The ubiquity of the internet has added a new dimension to polling with new organizations like YouGov now doing solely internet-based polling. However, the biggest problem in polling today is the fact that there are so many organizations and so few ways to present the same findings. The consequence of this is that there now exists a clear bias in these polls and in these polling organizations. Trafalgar Group, based in Atlanta, modeled its entire 2020 presidential polls with the idea that there existed significant "shy, pro-Trump" votes that were being severely undercounted. Trafalgar went on to incorrectly predict all 5 battleground states that ended up voting for Joe Biden and to this day has refused to disclose its polling methods.
As much as we like to mock biased polls that are so clearly wrong, there are real-world consequences when this happens. On August 4th of this year, SurveyUSA, an A-rated poll based in New Jersey, released a poll showing California voters favoring the recall of Gavin Newsom by a shocking 11 points. Three weeks later, SurveyUSA released a follow-up poll that had the recall failing by 8 points and included a note about their incorrect methodology that caused the first shock poll three weeks prior. Their final poll showed no on recall with a 13-point advantage. But the entire political landscape of the Golden State had been changed. California Democrats kicked it into overdrive. Volunteers flocked to the campaign to do virtual campaigning and fundraising. When all was said and done, Newsom had exceeded all polling expectations and won by a rollicking 24 points. Like it or not, polling had been a critical factor in turnout in an off-off year election, and once again we had another Dewey Defeats Truman moment, thanks to faulty polling.
This is part-and-parcel for modern-day polling organizations. They are paid simply to take a snapshot in time. The problem is that those snapshots are then used to drive campaign activity and are used in the narrative around the election in question. Political campaigns often hire their own local polling firms for internal polls to avoid the outside noise of what may very well be a biased external poll. These polls are costly, so it is very unlikely that a challenger has access to a poll and instead must use her or his resources in other, more creative ways. But if a negative poll gets released, that candidate is then responsible for how she or he responds. Sometimes, in the case of Gavin Newsom, it can fire up the base. Other times, a candidate falls victim to one single bad poll and she or he is simply unable to recover. How the candidate responds is a testament to their character.
That is why it is so critical that Democrats and Democratic voters ignore the noise these next 3 years. Polls will wildly fluctuate, especially the approval rating of Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr. Our national media likes nothing better than for a sitting Democratic president to have an unfavorable approval rating and we've already seen them wet themselves during the first 48 hours of the Afghanistan evacuation when they thought they'd have The Fall of Saigon 2.0. With Biden's approval rating temporarily hovering around 43% the news media is now able to craft a narrative about how "unpopular" Joe Biden is as a result of his policies. Remember that TFG's approval rating never got above 49% and yet he still garnered support from over 74 million brain-dead Americans. That, it itself, should tell all of us that if someone with a 34% approval rating can win 47% of the vote then perhaps polls aren't a political death sentence that our media claim them to be.
This is why we shouldn't lose sleep over polls from now on. They're a relic from a bygone era, used solely to create news when none exists. They represented an antiquated method of reaching voters by primarily using landlines rather than cellphones. They require the participants to already be passionate about the subject at hand because why would you waste your time to take a 15-minute survey about something you didn't care about? They base their required respondents on past demographics rather than current ones. They have a built-in margin of error that when doubled actually portrays what could potentially be a 6 to 8 point swing in either direction. The sample size can vary wildly and is often generated by polling only a few hundred voters in states with millions of residents. There's a reason why the 2020 election polls were the least accurate in decades and that reason was that participants themselves felt no need to tell the truth to their pollster. All and all, political polls have become a half-step up from throwing a dart at a dartboard to determine the winner of an election.
None of this will stop polls from being done or our media from reporting them as if they are breaking news. The only solution is to block out the noise. Don't run scared but also don't take anything for granted. Campaign with the goal in mind of absolutely obliterating your political opponent. Volunteer for state and local races in your area. If you have time and resources, volunteer for out-of-state races (hello, Virginia and New Jersey in 1 week!). Polling organizations exist solely to create drama in this day and age. Nobody looks back on a poll that correctly predicted an election result. But that one poll that was way off, well that's huge news and let's try and figure out why that is! We deserve better than that and since we won't get it, it's up to all of us to push forward and simply drown out any controversy that polling organizations will attempt to create over the next 3 years.
And it's up to all of us to vote Democratic with such huge margins that we blow the polls away, making them as meaningless as they've always been.