Daily reporting of TV ratings used to be a big problem. Every weekday morning, The Hollywood Reporter would write up the Nielsen nights and try to find the most interesting story within the data, and this type of reporting was a hot commodity throughout the industry trade press. But as the streaming and on-demand era dawned, it mattered less and less how well a show performed on its very first night. So in 2020, THR moved away of recording overnight stays in all but the most convincing cases. The numbers became meaningless.
Something similar seems to be happening with election polls, yet major media outlets still invest heavily in polls that indicate who could be ahead in Arizona, or what the spread is could be in the national popular vote.
The polls I’m very wrong in 2016.
The polls has been largely correct in 2018.
The polls got it wrong in 2020.
The polls am somewhat wrong in 2022.
Will the polls be wrong in 2024? We’ll find out soon. But it’s hard to be sure what exactly the polls say. Poll analysis master Nate Silver has reprimanded pollsters for pumping out suspect data sets, suggesting that pollsters might be able to ‘herd’ (which is apparently a fancy word for ‘cheating’) to achieve an effective tie to avoid being wrongly looked at later.
There are reasons why modern pollsters struggle: Shy Donald Trump voters. Shy Kamala Harris voters? Especially the difficulty in reaching voters young and minority voters – in the mobile phone era. As with TV ratings, the landscape has changed and the numbers have become vague.
Surveys obviously have enormous value for the campaigns themselves that participate in them private poll. They need to know if their message is working and how to allocate resources to different states. These types of polls make perfect sense.
But why does the general public need to see hundreds of horse race polls in the media during an election cycle? What exactly does that achieve? Especially weeks and months in advance? I would say polls are – and this is my excuse for writing about this The Hollywood Reporter — an entertainment product. It’s not real news. It’s semi-scientific voodoo; so fleeting that one study found they are only 60 percent accurate and are becoming less and less reliable. Yet they are sponsored by some of the most prestigious media institutions, places where 60 percent accuracy – even 90 percent accuracy – is nowhere near the threshold for publishing a mainstream news story. But since these institutions all invest in polls and draw traffic from poll stories, and we don’t, I can easily say: Polls are passé. It doesn’t do anyone any good, and can even be bad.
Because the bigger problem with polls isn’t their coin toss accuracy, but their lack of public value, even when they’re right. What do opinion polls achieve? Before early voting starts, they seem to stress everyone out a little. And haven’t we all had enough of that? Once the elections have started and the polls show that our preferred candidate is far ahead, we are less likely to vote (They have this in the bag anyway). If the polls show that our preferred candidate is way down, we are also less likely to vote (Oh well, they’re going to lose anyway). If the polls say — as the polls have maintained this election cycle — that the race is super-duper close, then they’re not actually doing the thing you expect a poll to do: telling you who’s winning.
That last scenario is the only one Defenders of the polls point this out – that close polling can motivate people to vote. The problem is that this assumes the poll is correct, while sometimes it isn’t. And it still doesn’t justify the months of public opinion polling before voting begins. And since everyone ignores polls when they’re right, but destroys polls when they’re wrong, they are arguably contributing to undermining public trust in the media because, rightly or wrongly, election misses make a lot more noise than the hits ( the 2022 polls, for example, got a lot rightbut still get confused with 2016 and 2020 for some things they didn’t do). We live in a time where it shouldn’t be okay to ‘do something wrong’, yet the same media outlets that are rightly concerned about online disinformation also post stories like: Harris is three points ahead in Wisconsin, maybe lol?
And just imagine what the last six months would have been like if you hadn’t seen a single poll story, and instead just saw reporting and opinions about the candidates. Still terrible, for sure. But less bad? Instead, Big Polling seems obsessed with figuring out how to make polls more accurate after each embarrassing failure — what additional weighting, methodology, and adjustments they can make to fix it all. Like it’s really important to solve all this, without ever asking yourself, wait, do we even have to keep doing this? As a wise mathematician once said, “They were so preoccupied with whether they could or couldn’t that they didn’t stop to think about whether they should.”
So whoever emerges victorious today, let’s all agree in the future to vote with our attention and stop reading the polls. If we do this, they will go away and stop bothering us. Granted, from a survey of my friends, most of whom didn’t answer the phone, the chance that this will work is maybe 2 percent, and that’s within the margin of error.