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For most of every two-year election cycle, but especially as we approach Election Day, we are blindsided. Despite all the campaign ads and rehearsed speeches and fake scandals and, in some rare cases, real personal arguments, we don’t know which team will do better by flipping sides. We don’t like to hang around with that uncertainty, so we turn to the political drug of choice: polls.
Voting began in late summer, when the most aggressive early voting states of Minnesota and South Dakota began voting in September. The first set of real results don’t come until after the polls close on Election Day, and at that point, they come in so wildly that it’s easy to lose track of surprising wins and losses, as all 435 House seats, roughly a third of the Senate and three dozen governors are installed.
Instead, those of us who make careers in the political ecosystem substitute proxies: campaign finance reports, TV ad bookings, digital and social spending, candidate visits, voter registration data, even the hearsay of consultants that who is in and who is out. But we rely more on polls than any other vice. And the problem here is that what should be just another informational input has been treated as predictive.
“You are reading these like tea leaves. They’re hieroglyphs,” a surveyor texted me yesterday. “If you don’t know how to read them, you’re doing yourself a disservice.”
This is not an uncommon complaint among survey professionals. And for good reason. And I’m as guilty as anyone else.
Public opinion polls have become a substitute for actual analysis. Take, for example, the change in a recent New York Times/ Siena survey that found the most predictive question in that survey to show a change in its most important question. When asked who should control Congress next year, Republicans appeared to have a 4-point lead over Democrats; read the actual numbers, it’s closer to 2.5 points. Insignificant? Of course. But not entirely a rounding error.
Go a little lower in the voting numbers, and it gets a lot harder. of Times’ The September poll showed independent women favoring Democrats by a full 14 points. A month later, they are supporting Republicans by 18 points. This is an epic swing of 32 points, which is almost impossible to imagine in practice. But then you look at the details; integrated margin of error for small The sample size is 20 points. Simply put: they didn’t talk enough to those independent women to know what they’re talking about, but the rest of us can’t shut up about it.
And that’s the problem with surveys now: we treat it as Gospel. Polls have consistently — with the exception of 2012 — given Democrats a big lead in recent cycles. Pollsters have missed the turnout universe by factors of two to eight points. The Trump era contributed to an increase in voters refusing to engage with pollsters, resulting in false numbers. Professionals are already predicting data on waste in the stream. And the inconsistent analysis has left confidence in the polls shaky at best and devastating in reality.
However, most armchair political analysts look at the numbers as if they have the answer. Be honest: they don’t. They inform part of the discussion. They discern which campaigns may be toast. Polls can help decide whether a campaign should follow Twitter’s advice and make social justice the hill it should die on or stay with the economy. Kitchen table issues like inflation and gas prices have hit Democrats hard, but it’s also been half a century since abortion was as much in play as it is now. The poll offers some hints about what resonates and what doesn’t, but no politician who wants to be seen as a leader accepts what a pollster tells them.
In this, Speaker Nancy Pelosi was not wrong when, in recent weeks, she began telling allies that every single race is its own universe with its own peculiarities. National headwinds don’t necessarily blow as hard in suburban Richmond, for example. If the GOP holds every seat that was in Trump’s column in 2020 AND carries all of Biden’s districts that Biden won by five points or less, Republicans will still only have a six-seat majority — hardly a complete landslide.
While there are many—emphasis: many—reasons to roll your eyes at the assertion that Democrats might actually pick up seats this cycle, there’s at least one rational argument that things might not turn out as dire as national forecasts predict. Anecdotally, things are not smelt so desperate for liberals but there is no real evidence to back this up.
At least no evidence beyond poll-fed notions.
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