Polling is broken, and everyone knows it.
So let’s stop obsessing over the polls.
Try this at home:
Next time you’re watching MSNBC or CNN, see how long it takes a reporter touting a new opinion poll to add the acknowledgement that opinion polling has been way out of whack in recent cycles and is likely to be getting a lot of things wrong in this one. It can happen in the same breath. (I’m looking at you, @samstein).
In the old days, only a handful of companies specialized in opinion polls—there was Gallup, Harris, and maybe a few college and university surveys that were considered reliable. Back when the only telephones were landlines, hardly anyone even knew someone who’d ever received a call from a pollster, let alone answered one themselves.
Now hundreds of polling firms compete with market researchers and fundraisers to reach those dwindling numbers of humans who might pick up the phone.
Dan Pfeiffer writes in The Message Box,
“When was the last time you answered a call from an unknown number? Almost all polling calls are marked “potential spam” by the iPhone. A few years ago, someone involved in the Obama data team told me that the response rate for our polls dropped 50 percent from 2008 to 2012 and then 50 percent again in 2016. It’s safe to say that Democrats aren’t the ones answering calls from unknown numbers and then spending a considerable amount of time on the phone with strangers.”
And New York Times columnist Nate Cohn asked the question, “Who in the World Is Still Answering Pollsters’ Phone Calls?” It’s important to understand, Cohn says,
“just how few people are answering. In the poll we have in the field right now, only 0.4 percent of dials have yielded a completed interview. If you were employed as one of our interviewers at a call center, you would have to dial numbers for two hours to get a single completed interview.”
In fact, according to Cohn, it’s getting pretty close to “death of telephone polling numbers.”
If that amount of bottom of the barrel scraping wasn’t bad enough, no survey can predict precisely who will end up voting. A story in National Journal headlined “Horse-Race Polls Are Not Fixable” said,
“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.”
Sure, polling can be a good way for consultants to justify their fees I mean campaigns and the public to understand the electorate.
But how much can we still learn from this terminally dysfunctional system, in which someone you’ve never heard of is asking you to give opinions on something you’ve never thought about, with little room for nuance?
Maybe there’s a better way.
I’ve written before about how much has changed since I first got interested in politics.
In this op-ed I argued why politics and elections still matter, and I invoked my favorite Robert Kennedy quote to suggest that young voters consider the possibility that political heroes can exist, even today.
Quite a few of them, in fact, are running for office this cycle. If they win, Democrats can hold on to the House and elect a Manchin-proof majority in the Senate.
Polling done by Ipsos for FiveThirtyEight before the 2020 election showed that 78% of young people said they planned to vote in 2020. But according to the Census, voter turnout in the 2020 elections was lowest among those ages 18-24, at 51.4%.
Call it the Butterfly Effect of voter turnout. If enough people who say they’ll vote actually do so, history can turn and we can have things like health care, racial justice, gender equality, and a fair economy.
Instead of worrying about the polls, let’s spend the next three weeks reminding people why voting is so important. Send money, knock on doors, make calls and most of all, talk to young voters and others who need a little encouragement to vote. Maybe no one’s ever told them why it matters. Maybe that could be you.
(And yes, the subtitle to this post is a reference to this movie.)