Just say no
Hello. My name is digby and I am a poll addict. I really wish I wasn’t because I’m not equipped to deal with commentary like that above from the person who runs 538. I am an ordinary person caught in the vortex of a close election and I may just end up losing my mind over it. Don’t go there if you value your sanity.
Historian Rick Perlstein has a great column on polls today that you really should read. (And then go read some fiction or watch the game or do some phone banking. Anything but look at those damned polling averages.)
W. Joseph Campbell’s Lost in a Gallup: Polling Failure in U.S. Presidential Elections demonstrates—for the first time, strangely enough, given the robust persuasiveness of its conclusions—that presidential polls are almost always wrong, consistently, in deeply patterned ways.
Unusual for any historical narrative, the pattern is almost unchanged for a good hundred years. First, someone comes forth with some new means of measuring how people will vote for president, and gets it so right it feels like magic. That was the accomplishment of a magazine called The Literary Digest between 1924 and 1932. They sent as many sample ballots as existing technological infrastructure would allow—in 1932, some 20 million—on postcards that doubled as subscription ads. Then, with the greatest care, they counted the ones that came back. For three straight elections, they got it so right the Raleigh News and Observer half-joked that it “would save millions in money and time” to “quit holding elections and accept the Digest’s poll as final.”
In 2008, that was the accomplishment of Nate Silver, who called 49 out of 50 states; in 2012, he notched 50 for 50, scored a best-selling book, and reportedly accounted in the run-up to the election for 20 percent of the traffic for his new employer, The New York Times.
In part two of the cycle, yesterday’s miracle suffers a spectacular failure—as in the poll-crazy year of 1936, when modern political polling was invented by the triumvirate of George Gallup, Elmo Roper, and Archibald Crossley, who all called it for Roosevelt over Alf Landon, where the Digest only gave him 41 percent of the popular vote. Their technical revolution (directly querying a representative sample of the electorate) seemed so obvious in retrospect, you wonder how nobody thought of it before. The same with Silver’s model of aggregating, then evaluating and weighting for accuracy, existing state polls.
They’re cocky about it; that’s a pattern, too. That’s what tends to proceed their most spectacular failures.
In early September of 1948, Elmo Roper announced that he wouldn’t publish further results, because “the outcome is settled.” Archibald Crossley vowed to stop counting because “there had been little late shift in 1936, 1940, and 1944.” Just like in 1928, people asked why we should even bother having an election. So confident were the experts that the famous Chicago Daily Tribune early-edition headline “DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN” was only one of many. A German newspaper even described what it claimed was a raucous celebration of Dewey’s victory in Times Square.
Kind of like in 2016, when reporters saw Clinton associates popping champagne corks on Election Day in the campaign plane.
POLLSTERS NEXT DO WHAT ONE WOULD EXPECT: They adjust their methods—but to fight the last war. What else can they do?
Read the whole thing. It is fascinating and I had no idea. I particularly enjoyed his withering analysis of the Nate Silver phenomenon. It’s not the first time one of these guys has fallen from the heights but it’s the most recent and it’s very instructive.
They are all fighting the last war in this election season and we don’t even know which war it is! Most are re-fighting the last presidential campaign in 2020 but consider that it was one of the most unusual races in history with a global pandemic that had tons of people not working or working from home, glued to their TVs and computers and mass voting by mail. 2024 is nothing like that. Others are apparently using a method that combines 2020 results with 2022, which was not only a mid-term and therefore very different from today, but also one which came after the cataclysmic Supreme Court decision in Dobbs which may have actually realigned the electorate. (We’ll see about that.) Now we have the weird circumstances of a former president who was fired running again, against the first Black woman candidate who wasn’t even in the campaign until late July. It’s a little unusual!
You can see why fighting the last war might not be exactly accurate. Or it might. We just don’t know.
After reading Rick’s piece I became convinced that polling, especially in these days of daily updates and averages and non-stop coverage is really just a parlor game for political junkies. If you want to put yourself through it (or can’t help yourself like me) just be aware that nobody really knows nothin’.
We just have to hope our team knows what it’s doing and that more Americans do the right thing than the wrong thing this time. I soothe myself with the knowledge that they have done so in every election since 2016 — but then again, as these pollsters know but can’t admit, past elections can’t predict the future any more than your average carnival fortune teller can.
Six. More. Weeks.