Get over yourselves
Daily Beast this morning reads like a MAD Magazine “TV Ads We’d Like to See.”
Pollsters Have ‘No F*cking Idea What’s Going to Happen’ This Election
If the pollsters and handicappers end up being spectacularly wrong on Election Night, there’s one group that won’t be too surprised: the pollsters and handicappers themselves.
The 2022 midterms could go exactly as modeled—a 20-some-odd-seat pickup for Republicans in the House and maybe a 51-49 GOP Senate—but the people who watch these races the closest are also warning they might be wrong in decisive ways. In either direction.
“We’re down to 1 percent of people on a good day who are willing to talk to a pollster for free,” Dave Wasserman of Cook Political Report tells The Beast. “Response rates suck.”
Wasserman, perhaps the top handicapper of U.S. House races, said everyone was trying different ways to solve for “partisan non-response bias”—essentially a measure of how a poll isn’t representative of the actual population—but that means every pollster was making “a different assumption about who’s going to show up on Nov. 8 that may or may not be accurate.”
Republican voters distrustul of pretty much everything won’t answer polls or will give false answers to screw with “the media,” “the system,” or whatever.
“We are, in many respects, stumbling through the dark with headlamps and flashlights,” Wasserman told The Beast. “And we have a vague understanding of where these races stand, but there are bound to be surprises.”
Oh, we’ve been surprised before. Unpleasantly. There was no way, I told myself and others in 2016, that there were enough Americans like Talks To The Sky crazy enough to elect Donald J. Trump. In fact, there were more where she came from.
Plus polling firms paid to produce Republican-friendly results, as The Times’ Nate Cohn wrote on Saturday:
“There has been a wave of polls by firms like the Trafalgar Group, Rasmussen Reports, Insider Advantage and others that have tended to produce much more Republican-friendly results than the traditional pollsters,” Cohn wrote. “None adhere to industry standards for transparency or data collection. In some states, nearly all of the recent polls were conducted by Republican-leaning firms.”
If that sounds like a potential recipe for overstating the GOP’s standing in polls, it could be. But Cohn sent out a different newsletter on Nov. 1. That one was titled “A Worrisome Pattern Re-emerges in Seeking Response From Republicans.”
“In our final wave of Senate and House polls in the last few days, that hallmark of nonresponse bias looks as if it’s back,” Cohn wrote.
“No one knows for sure,” The Beast concludes. Pollsters are talking to the sky.
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Please go vote and take family and friends.