Don't Ask Me About Football
But Go Ahead And Ask Sports Fans About Politics
I don’t know anything about sports, and couldn’t express an informed opinion about football, baseball, hockey or basketball if my life depended on it.
I manage to cope.
I suspect that the way I feel about professional sports mirrors the way most people feel about politics. Actually, they probably manage better than I do when pushed out of their comfort zone. If a pollster, say, asked my views of a team, player, coach or controversy whatever I said wouldn’t mean much. I certainly wouldn’t want the New York Times to draw any conclusions about the national mood based on my arbitrary and ill-informed answers.
It’s a good thing that data collected from sports agnostics like me don’t count for anything important, like determining who will be President.
Do you see where I’m going with this?
The polls you’re reading of “registered voters” can’t predict who of that cohort will become actual voters on Election Day. I’ll trot out that quote from National Journal again:
“The entire concept of polling depends on having a set population from which one can take a random sample and get a generally representative snapshot. Pre-election polls have no existing population—the election hasn’t happened yet, and voting isn’t compulsory in the U.S., so we simply don’t have a population of who voted until all the polls have closed on Election Day.”
“We can’t remedy that. The population of voters will never exist prior to the election. Expecting polls to be able to consistently, accurately predict an election is asking more than is statistically and theoretically possible.”
Now consider that those registered voters include a lot of people who spend as much time thinking about politics as I do about football. Why should you listen to them?
This far out from the election, even people who focus on politics aren’t focusing on politics as much as they will be later. What most respondents tell a pollster might depend more on what they just saw on TikTok than anything they read in a newspaper online. Ask again after something like a presidential debate.
(Will Trump really debate Biden on CNN? Maybe. But I’ll take bets now on whether he shows up for a second round after a TKO in the first. OMG!—I made a sports reference).
When you see polls like the recent one in the New York Times you can react like Joe Scarborough, who spoke with his usual understated reserve:
“The New York Times right now is actively shaping the election cycles where this poll comes out on a Sunday and on Monday people go, ‘Oh, and I heard it,’ and I’m sitting there going, oh, don’t be so stupid.”
“There’s one poll that’s wildly skewed every time, and it does shape if it’s a New York Times poll versus the Morning Consult poll. And the New York Times then amplifies it 15, 16, 17 times. It warps reality. And everybody responds to that in the media and in the political world. It distorts all of the opinion, it distorts everything.”
“And that keeps happening every month when this comes out. And then finally, about two weeks later, after the residue of the New York Times-Siena poll leaves, people go, ‘Oh, I think Joe Biden’s on a winning streak.’ And then two weeks later, it comes out again, and it’s garbage. It’s an outlier.”
Or you can read the always wise
, including this advice from :My advice with this and all polls is to take it seriously, but not literally. No poll is flawless; even the most accurate one can’t predict the future. Instead, think of polls as snapshots of how voters feel right now. Focus on the overall trends and significant insights rather than getting caught up in the day-to-day fluctuations. Use the poll data strategically to understand what resonates with voters and how to communicate our message effectively.
To that I’d add a reminder of what I’ve been saying in this space for months. Even the Trump campaign acknowledges that “the actual current reality” of the Electoral College landscape has only three swing states: Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. Democrats want to add Nevada, Arizona and maybe Georgia and North Carolina to that list, Trump wants to go for Virginia and Minnesota. (Ha!)
While you may see polls of registered voters that show Trump ahead or tied in Pennsylvania or Michigan, don’t believe them. Do you think there are very many voters who rejected Trump in 2020 who now think he’s terrific? No matter how mild their enthusiasm is for Biden, they won’t vote for the autocrat with dementia. I’ll link to Doonesbury and quote Maggie Haberman again:
“Mr. Trump has treated his own words as disposable commodities, intended for single use, and not necessarily indicative of any deeply held beliefs.”
Even if they don’t vote, most of us humans do have our own deeply held values and beliefs, and elections are always about which candidate better represents them. With abortion on the ballot—and, I fully expect, a convicted felon as well—by Election Day even voters who know as much about elections as I do about sports will know which candidate is on their side.
Especially in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.
