I’m Fed Up With the Obsession Over Polls

Walking my dog. On the Metro. In line at a sandwich shop. People keep coming up and asking me about “the polls.” What do the numbers mean? Should they be worried about the election? If a set of swing state polls is released, the odds are by the end of the day I will have been asked by a friend, a relative, a neighbor, or a stranger, or several, “Did you see that poll in Nevada? Why was there a shift of three points since the last one? How could Pennsylvania be going in a different direction? And North Carolina, really? Do you think that’s accurate?” If they start referencing Nate Silver, Nate Cohn, or any of the other pollster celebs...I want to scream.

Polls, to be hyperbolic about it, have ruined American politics. Okay, a lot has ruined American politics. But polls have certainly made American politics less enjoyable. Many of those who follow politics—and not enough citizens do—have become slaves of polling, overly obsessed with these surveys and palpitating over the slightest changes. I’m not unsympathetic. This election is prompting more anxiety than most. The oft-repeated mantra that the 2024 race could determine whether the United States remains an imperfect democracy or slips toward a more authoritarian form of governance is true. Thus, every iota of data related to the face-off between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris appears loaded with relevance and consequence. Still, the hyperfixation on polls is unwarranted and distracts us from other important aspects of this most important election.

Polls don’t matter. Or maybe they do. It depends on your definition of “matters.” By all measurements, this is a close race. What else do you need to know? The candidates are within a few points of each other in the national polls and the swing state polls. But the difference is usually within the reported margin of error. That means the poll that has just caused you heartburn may not have any value in terms of telling us what will happen on Election Day.

And get this: That margin of error may not even be accurate.

While doing a little (but not much) research for this rant, I came across a useful article from the Pew Research Center, which does a lot of polling. It was published this summer and called “Key things to know about U.S. election polling in 2024.” The piece made the usual points. In 2016 and 2020, polling underestimated Trump’s performance. (Polls on average overestimated Hillary Clinton’s strength by 1.3 percent and Joe Biden’s by 3.9 percent.) The 2022 nonpartisan polls—meaning those taken by the media and research centers and not by campaigns and political groups—were more accurate than people may have assumed after the mythical “red wave” did not materialize. Polling methodologies have shifted to keep current with changes (such as the decrease in the use of landlines and a low response rate). Pollsters have improved how they weigh demographic variables to obtain representative samplings.

What was most interesting in this article, though, was what it said about the margin of error: “The real margin of error is often about double the one reported.” What? Read that again. Double the margin of error. “A typical election poll sample of about 1,000 people,” Pew tells us, “has a margin of sampling error that’s about plus or minus 3 percentage points.” That’s usually the number you see associated with a poll. Three percent. That doesn’t seem so bad.

But there are other errors. If you must know, they are called noncoverage error, nonresponse error, and measurement error. I’m not going to go into the technical details here. But this is the bottom line from Pew: “The problem is that sampling error is not the only kind of error that affects a poll. Those other kinds of error, in fact, can be as large or larger than sampling error. Consequently, the reported margin of error can lead people to think that polls are more accurate than they really are...Several recent studies show that the average total error in a poll estimate may be closer to twice as large as that implied by a typical margin of sampling error. This hidden error underscores the fact that polls may not be precise enough to call the winner in a close election.”

So are you really going to pull your hair out over a poll with a margin of error of 6 points? C’mon. Get a grip.

It’s easy to be a polling Grinch. If you want to dive into such territory, I commend two well-researched articles. In 2015, historian Jill Lepore wrote a lengthy and fascinating piece in the New Yorker on the history of polling that took a dim view of this practice and decried its impact on US politics. She explored the decades-old debate among social scientists as to whether there really is such a thing as “public opinion,” questioning whether polling measures it or creates it. George Gallup, who helped invent the polling industry, believed it did exist and could be quantified for edification and profit. But Lepore offered the case that whoever was correct about this, polling and the media addiction to it is not beneficial for democracy. After citing the Gallup Poll’s former managing editor David Moore’s remark that “media polls give us distorted readings of the electoral climate, manufacture a false public consensus on policy issues, and in the process undermine American democracy,” Lepore added her own observation: “Polls don’t take the pulse of democracy; they raise it.”

Referencing Trump’s 2016 campaign, she concluded, “Donald Trump is a creature of the polls. He is his numbers. But he is only a sign of the times. Turning the press into pollsters has made American political culture Trumpian: frantic, volatile, shortsighted, sales-driven, and anti-democratic.”

Lepore might have been unduly pessimistic about pollsters meeting the technical challenges of the day, but on the Big Idea she was prescient. Picking up where she left off is Samuel Earle, a PhD candidate at Columbia Journalism School, who published a long essay on polling in the recent issue of the New York Review of Books. (His piece is ostensibly a review of Strength in Numbers: How Polls Work and Why We Need Them by G. Elliot Morris, the editorial director of data analytics at ABC News and FiveThirtyEight, its polling review outlet.) Earle, too, wonders about the nature of public opinion and the ability to capture it. He presents a harsh history of the polling biz, noting that Gallup once said of polling, “If it works for toothpaste, why not for politics?” And he applies the Heisenberg observer effect to polling:

[E]very attempt to study how people think and act has the potential to influence how they think and act, thus changing what is being recorded, either in self-fulfilling or self-negating ways. The results of any poll on a particular issue are liable to change how people think about that issue, just as any poll showing a candidate’s popularity is liable to influence that candidate’s popularity. 

Polls are shortcuts to understanding a rather complicated matter: how millions of Americans, each operating on different levels of engagement with different levels of information, will make a specific decision. In a way, polls may be comforting, providing the fantasy of certainty (or possible certainty) in a sea of unknowing. But they can enhance anxiety and smother more substantive discussions of an election. They definitely are useful for campaigns, as the political professionals strive to find the best messages and plot out how most effectively to use their resources. Which states should we spend money on? Where should we send the candidate? What themes and ideas seem to be resonating? Let’s look at the numbers.

Earle acknowledges the benefits of polling for the pros. But he’s right when he observes, “[P]olls saturate election coverage, turn politics into a spectator sport, and provide an illusion of control over complex, unpredictable, and fundamentally fickle social forces.”

The fascination with polls also reflects the data-fication of society and popular culture. Here’s one crude analogy. For many years, only Hollywood insiders pored over the opening-weekend box office returns for movies. But at some point—I can’t recall when—seemingly everyone began talking about that first weekend take. The question was no longer, Is this movie good? It became, How did it do?

I’m sure we can chart how polls came to dominate political coverage. In the mid-1970s, according to Lepore, media outlets, which had previously relied on Gallup’s firm and other polling outfits, began conducting their own polls. “[W]e’ve been off to the races ever since,” she wrote. And now coverage of polls crowds out other elements of the race. When someone (like me) complains about horse-race political journalism, this is often what they have in mind.

Here's a recent example. When Harris earlier this month proposed expanding Medicare to include home health care, the New York Times placed its story on this plan on page A12. On the front page, the top story was a report on the new swing state polls the newspaper had conducted with Siena College. The Times was promoting its own polling and—with other outlets picking up these findings—creating a news cycle. Yet Harris’ proposal could affect millions of Americans. It was arguably more consequential than the polls of the moment. Adhering to its basic precepts of politics coverage, the editors of the Times deemed those surveys more important.

There’s plenty more to say about polls. Political pros and amateurs love debating which ones are more accurate and how they are used or abused. (Some libs have recently been complaining that Republicans are producing junk polling that shows Trump in a better position in order to rig the national averages of polls in his favor.) Politicos assess how to recalibrate this year’s surveys according to various factors. (What if the current polls are wrong in the way the 2020 polls were wrong? What if they are wrong in the way some of the 2022 polls were wrong?) Polling is a cottage industry. Dissecting polls is one as well. Or perhaps a hobby. Like fantasy football. (At least in fantasy football you pick and manage your team and possess some agency.)

You will note that I’ve managed to get through this diatribe without declaring that a poll is just a snapshot in time and that the only poll that counts is on Election Day. More to the point, polls are the sugar high and empty calories of politics. And they make for lazy—or, at least, easy—journalism. I’d rather see reporters dig into other stuff. The ties between right-wing extremism and the GOP, the dirty deeds being perpetuated by billionaire-funded super-PACs, the role of dark money and disinformation in this campaign, the how-this-affects-you implications of the candidates’ positions. I bet that if you asked voters and news consumers, a majority would agree. Let’s poll that.

Got anything to say about this item—or anything else? Email me at ourland.corn@gmail.com.

As mentioned in a recent issue, I wrote a major piece explaining how Trump is running a disinformation operation, not a political campaign. After it was published, I went on MSNBC to discuss the article. If you haven’t gotten a chance to read it and want the CliffsNotes version, take a look:

Donald Trump has turned all his supporters into Baghdad Bobs.

The wannabe-autocrat appears to be declining by the day. At a campaign rally this past week, he stopped taking questions and stood on the stage for 39 minutes, swaying to the music of his own playlist. The next day, at the Chicago Economic Club, he couldn’t maintain his train of thought while answering questions and snapped at the interviewer when presented with basic facts about his inflationary tariffs-for-all economic plan. Yet Trump cultists praised these performances. Jack Posobiec, a conspiracy theory-promoting Trump fanboy (who recently co-wrote a book celebrating fascist dictators Francisco Franco of Spain and Augusto Pinochet of Chile for using violence against leftists), gushed about the rally: “Everyone had a fantastic time. Everyone in the room loved it. It was basically a concert. They turned the town hall into a rock hall and Donald Trump and everybody else got to hang out and listen to music.”

As for Trump’s disastrous economic chat, which was sponsored by Bloomberg, Fox host Laura Ingraham hailed Trump’s appearance: “Now, how many politicians can step out on stage with no notes, and lay out the intricacies of US trade policy, the federal reserve, interest rates, etc.”

Did she sleep through the Clinton and Obama years?

And Eric Trump banged the same drum: “My father has never been better than he is right now...The man is absolutely on point, you saw what he did with Bloomberg today...The entire place was literally eating out of his hands.”

These Trumpers are suffering from Dear Leader-itis.

Another sufferer is House Speaker Mike Johnson. Asked by NBC News host Kristen Welker if Trump should release his medical records, he resorted to heavy dissembling:

He issued the records of his physician. Kamala Harris issued her medical records as a diversion because she’s desperate because she’s sinking in the polls. Donald Trump’s health is on display. Everyone in America can see it. The man works nonstop. He never quits. He probably sleeps four hours a night. He doesn’t require as much sleep as the average person. He’s an unusual figure.

Yes, we all can see he’s an obese figure who moves stiffly and whose remarks prompt questions about his cognitive abilities. And Johnson lied: Trump didn’t release the “records of his physician.” He released two vague letters written by physicians. One of those came from Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-Texas), a MAGA extremist. (An inspector general’s report found that Jackson engaged in inappropriate interactions with subordinates and heavy drinking when he was a White House physician.)

In recent interviews, JD Vance has been asked repeatedly whether Trump lost the 2020 election, and he steadfastly refused to answer. He can’t dare suggest otherwise. That would be blasphemy within the Cult of Trump. Then at a rally this week, when the question came up again, Vance said, “I think there were serious problems in 2020. So did Donald Trump lose the election? Not by the words that I would use."

Not by words that I would use. What does that mean? Is he trying to say no without saying no? If this contest was for the most weaselly comment of the week, he’d be a shoe-in.

The most frightening dumbass remark of the week came from Michael Flynn, Trump’s disgraced national security adviser who has become a QAnonish Christian nationalist crusader. At a religious-right jamboree, he was asked whether, in the event of a Trump victory, he would “sit at the head of a military tribunal to not only drain the swamp, but imprison the swamp, and on a few occasions, execute the swamp.” Execute the swamp. Did Flynn reject this suggestion? No. He replied:

What your sentiment is about is accountability...I definitely believe we need accountability. Your question went into some other areas that, I think, a lot of people actually think like you do, and I think that that’s your right and privilege...There's a way to get after this, but we have to win first...These people are already up to no good, so we gotta win first. We win, and then Katie, bar the door. Believe me, the gates of hell, my hell will be unleashed.

He was legitimizing this dude’s violence-encouraging perspective and bolstering it with his talk of unleashing “the gates of hell.” Not what Jesus would do.

In a normal week, Flynn would claim the prize with such talk. But this week, the judges decided to lift the mercy rule usually applied to Trump, for going above and beyond his usual level of hatred and crassness. Appearing at a women’s town hall arranged by Fox—where the female participants were screened by the network and turned out to be Trump supporters—Trump was told that the family of Amber Thurman, who died in August after she did not receive urgent care needed for an infection due to Georgia’s abortion ban, had presented a “prebuttal” to Trump’s remarks. Trump shook his head, grinned, and said, “We’ll get better ratings, I promise.” He chuckled; the audience laughed.

Horrible, simply horrible. Trump has uttered a host of idiotic and disturbing comments this week, blathering about the “enemy within” and vowing to use the military against his political rivals. Not much surprises the good people of DCotW. But this remark shocked the judges for its crudeness and insensitivity—they know it shouldn’t have—and for that they handed Trump the trophy.

Nancy Lane sent in a request:

I am praying Mother Jones and you can somehow respond to the devastating consequences of Donald Trump and JD Vance lies about FEMA. Morning Joe had a son talking about his North Carolina father who lost everything refusing help from FEMA workers because of what Trump said. My daughter does casework in North Carolina and hears the same thing from very poor mountain people.      

I wasn’t able to do much original reporting on the North Carolina situation. But I did reference it in my recent piece on Trump and disinformation. And I heard that interview on MSNBC with the son of the fellow in North Carolina who refused FEMA help because of the conspiracy theories spread by right-wing politicians and media. It was rather sad. His story and the entire Hurricane Helene episode show that the sort of disinformation Trump peddles not only perverts the political discourse but can be extremely dangerous.

Michelle Johnston had a recommendation to share:

Please read Rising Out of Hatred by Eli Saslow. It’s nonfiction about a young man nurtured to become the leader of the white nationalist/white supremacist movement. An underlying theme is Trumpism. The young man has a conversion at New College of Florida and saw the light. The language of white supremacy is the language Trump uses. More people need to read this book and understand how hate is interwoven into Trump, MAGA, and the Republicans. The white nationalist MAGA base existed, just waiting for someone like Trump. 

I haven’t read the book, which was published in 2018. But it seems to be relevant to what’s happening today. I have long said that the problem with Trumpism is not Trump but the tens of millions of Americans who are jazzed by his racism, misogyny, demagoguery, and tribalism. Those folks existed before he hit the political scene, and many will be here after he departs.

Heiko Heisermann emailed:

A thought about Trump: Many comment that his campaign does not make sense. But recall that he is all about the grift—his only source of income. So everything about his campaign is designed to increase his money, not his vote total. Then it does make sense.

Crypto, Bibles, sneakers, watches, trading cards—he sells it all. Trump sees any dose of attention as an opportunity to fleece and cash in. I don’t know if that’s why he ran for president a second time; he also had to worry about the criminal prosecutions filed against him. Overall, I believe his campaign for restoration is about feeding his ego and widening his wallet—two endeavors intricately intertwined. It is indeed both a floor wax and a dessert topping.  

The issue on Trump’s love affair with genetics (or eugenics) brought in plenty of mail, including emails from readers who wanted to remind us that Trump’s genetic legacy includes a high degree of shadiness.

Ruth Matthews wrote:

The Washington Post had a series of Trump articles about the time he was elected that included information on his immigrant ancestor from Germany. The US tried to get rid of the guy, but Germany would not take him back. So he went West and opened a series of what turned out to be whore houses and other questionable businesses. Why not include that info now? But no one does, including your article. Please paint the whole picture, not just the "we've got good genes" story that he himself tells.

Ruth has a bit of the chronology muddled. But Trump’s grandfather, Friedrich Trump, did operate a brothel in the Yukon. Here’s a detailed account of that.

Sarah Manire had a similar observation:

I found your article on Trump’s trumpeting about his sterling genetics ironic as well as appalling. As we remember, Trump’s grandfather fled Germany so as not to fight in its army, landing in America as a refugee. Later, when he tried to return home, Germany refused to let him back in. So he had to come back to America as an exile. As far as I can tell, Trump’s father also sidestepped the military, and throughout World War II remained in New York City, buying up property to make himself rich. And the current Trump, following family (genetic?) tradition, managed to get out of the Vietnam Era draft. After all, as he believes, guys who go off to fight wars are losers.

Chris Raymond wrote:

I've read that if Trump had just put his inheritance into an index fund, he'd be wealthier now. In other words, his great so-called genetic heritage actually did worse than doing nothing. 

That’s right. In 2021, Forbes noted that “Trump would be an estimated $400 million richer if he had just put his father’s money” in the S&P 500. Thus, if he had smarter genes, he would have done less and...made more.

“It’s getting cold outside, Moxie.”
“Is that why you put this silly hat on me?”
“Well...”
“Or is it because you need a cute photo of me for your newsletter and you’ve run out of good ideas?”
“I wouldn’t say that.”
“Of course you wouldn’t.”