Is the polling industry in crisis? And, perhaps more importantly, what does it mean for our democracy if we can’t trust information telling us what our fellow citizens think?
Bloomberg
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The issue here is much less worrisome for polling about issues than it is with respect to predictive election horserace polling, where tiny differences can (in battleground states, for example) have hugely consequential outcomes.
When polling about an issue like, say, immigration, if one is a few percentage points off it hardly ever has much impact on the basic story the poll is revealing. (Maybe it’s 64% of Americans who support an immigration policy rather than 67%; it’s still close to 2/3 either way and the basic story stays the same.) But those three percentage points can make a huge difference in the winner-take-all electoral context in a battleground state.
And not only are the stakes much higher in electoral polling, demanding pinpoint accuracy, the process is complicated mightily be the necessity of predicting likely voters. One needs a highly accurate predictive model about who’s going to vote on top of a super-accurate polling process, all in the midst of swirling political dynamics in a period of dramatic demographic, technological, and climate change (the weather affects turnout too). And, as if all that is not enough, the polling for this election took place in the midst of once-in-our-lifetime pandemic–factor that into your model! Huge surprise that some error crept into the process.
None of this is to excuse the failures of the polling industry during the election, it is just to put it in perspective. If one is peddling an accurate forecast of election results one should deliver, and I agree that methodology needs to improve along with changing social and technological conditions. But a larger question here is if all this horserace polling is helpful to the democratic process. Sure, it’s useful for campaign strategy, but how useful is it for the quality of our public discourse and for voter decision-making? From that perspective, I contend, horserace polling, while not irrelevant, sucks up way more attention than it’s worth.