Silver Bullet roller coaster. Photo by KeithJ (2005) via Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 DEED).
Dan Pfeiffer of Crooked Media attempts to coax readers of presidential polls off the ledge. His team has dubbed the stomach-churn the Pollercoaster.
Biden is up. Biden is down. Biden is tied. Trump is ahead by three, Biden is by six. Take a breath, Pfeiffer advises:
1. Polling is an Educated Guess
There are two rules for riding the Pollercoaster. First, polls are not supposed to be predictive. They don’t tell us what WILL happen. They try to tell us what is happening right now — during the polling period. Second, every poll is based on an educated guess about who is going to vote. When the polls are wrong — like they were in 2016 and 2020 — it’s because pollsters were wrong about the makeup of the electorate.
In 2016, the New York Times’s Nate Cohn gave the raw data from a poll of Floridians to four different well-respected pollsters and asked them to estimate the results of the poll using their methodology and models. And lo and behold, the four pollsters (and Cohn) got widely different results.
I would encourage everyone to read Nate’s write-up of the experiment because it’s one of the best explanations of the least understood and most opaque parts of polling.
The process of weighting the results to match one’s model of the likely electorate is rarely explained to the public, so it’s hard to understand exactly why the results differ, but that’s one main reason they do.
The 2024 election will be unprecedented, Pfeiffer explains, as was the COVID-19 election of 2020.
“For the first time in the modern era, a former president is running to reclaim his job. There is a historic level of dissatisfaction with both candidates,” Pfeiffer explains. “A record number of voters are expressing interest in voting for a third-party candidate. Finally, one of the candidates is facing the prospect of being convicted of a crime and sentenced to prison before the election.”
Regarding those third-party efforts, Pfeiffer adds:
First, every pollster is treating the No Labels candidacy differently. Some use possible candidates like West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin or former Republican Governor Larry Hogan. Others describe No Labels as a bipartisan organization. Secondly, we have no idea where these candidates will be on the ballot.
Ballot position makes a difference in the voting booth, and where the “thirds” land could be different in every state.
Finally, Pfeiffer gets to the factor that keeps me up at night: independents and young voters. When he sees two wildly divergent polls, Pfeiffer looks at the crosstabs for how those groups responded to poll questions:
In the Quinnipiac poll that has Biden winning by 6, he is beating Trump among Independents by 12. In the CNN poll, Biden is trailing Trump by 4 with Independents. In the Bloomberg/Morning Consult swing state poll, Biden is down 8 with Independents. In the NBC poll, Trump is winning Independents by 19 points!
The youth vote is a wild card even if the Harvard Youth Poll shows it leans Biden.
👀 One of the (if not THE) most important cohort of electorate & there's absolutely no consensus among major pollsters as to where youth vote is right now.
The bigger question is how many of them will turn out. The greatest untapped pool of eligible voters that lean blue are nonvoters under 45. They could run this joint if they truned out like their elders. We could lose it all if they don’t.
Right now, polls are a kind of “choose your own adventure” affair. People promote the ones that favor their favorites and downplay the rest. So Pfeiffer closes with some practical advice:
The broader trends of the recent polling tell me two things. First, Biden, at minimum, has stabilized, and things may be looking up as people’s views on the economy improve. Second, the polls are consistent with what we have long assumed — this is a very close and winnable race that will come down to less than 100,000 votes across a small handful of states. Our task is the same if the polls show Biden up by 2 or down by 5. We have to do the work of persuading voters, which is why you should immediately go to Vote Save America and sign up to do something other than worry about polls.
You can be a player or you can be a victim of politics. What’ll it be?
