Damn Lies and Pollsters Explained
Why I pay so little attention to polls
Let’s start with the obvious: Anyone paying any attention to the past few elections and who has even the foggiest recollection of events should already know that the pollsters keep getting it wrong. Lots of reasons - faulty sampling, bad questions, etc. etc.
But in polling - as in literally everything that relates to politics and media and pretty much everything else - I have a much simpler rule. It’s a broader variant of “follow the money”: Understand the Incentives (which, yeah, usually is money, but not always and not directly - why businessman have such a hard time understanding how government operates).
It’s simple - and it’s why campaigns are generally awful and why the RNC and DNC are disastrous - none of them, not the operatives, or the pollsters, or the journalists or the parties - none of them, not the media or the politicians - are incentivized to tell you the truth. (Just like nobody in government is incentivized to solve America’s problems.)
Sometimes, the incentive is not as clear - for example, campaigns release polls that are calculated to create enough anxiety that that you feel the need to donate or vote lest your candidate lose, but enough optimism that you know they can/should win if you do - because nobody wants to throw their money away or feel like a sucker for schlepping out to vote for a lost cause. And the media pay for similar polls because they need to generate “facts” to support the story they already know they want to tell you.
We’ll, I hope, dig down into media and politicians and parties another time. Let’s focus on the pollsters: In the above cases, the pollster know that if their polls don’t reflect that tightrope balance campaigns need or the spin the media want they’ll lose the client. So forget what they claim to be presenting to you (as accurate a snapshot as science can deliver) and consider what they are being paid for. In DC it’s widely understood among political professionals that the most sought after and successful pollsters are the ones whose expertise lies in creating polls that deliver exactly the results their clients want to see. Not the truth. Not what you want to know.
There is another category of polls - called “internals” - the polls that campaigns pay for to get their own assessment of what’s actually happening.
Yes, the “internals” are often less wildly doctored, but that’s where we get to faulty sampling, bad questions, etc., and anyway that’s not what the public is seeing and it’s not what the “journalists” are using to write stories or what the “experts” are using to make predictions.
And the fact that a separate category of polling even exists for those trying to figure out what’s really happening should tell you that the polls the media are feeding you are high in chemicals and filler and low in nutrition.
So, where can one get accurate polls?
One cannot.
At best, see whose incentives are least offensive/who gets it closest over time (recently people like Trafalgar for that - see prior post), but recognize that the true margin of error is much greater than the stated margin of error - it is that stated margin plus pollster error. And that true margin in almost every race close enough to keep you glued to the screen looking for clues - well, it’s either multiples or fractions of the real margin.
And the vaunted RCP average - that doesn’t really focus in on the truth. It’s not really crowdsourcing or finding some weighted average truth. It’s just as likely to aggravate the inherent gaming of the polls as it is to mitigate them. It has no rational center; it’s like preferring an asylum to an inmate or a prison to a thief - you’ve just got a meaningless number made by squashing together a bunch of bad numbers.
If you’re really clever, you can find other indicators to extrapolate from - like the very clever Phil Kerpen does here: https://x.com/kerpen/status/1853614082550649214.
Or see how sophisticated market players and hedge funds are betting - after all, their incentive is clear - they want to call it right, so they’re trying to tune out the white noise.
Or try to do what I do (unless I’m using them myself to manipulate someone):
Tune it all out. Vote. Pray. Do a mitzvah.
Work on what you can control - yourself.
Whatever is going to happen is going to happen.
Jeff
PS: A friend - with long experience as a journalist covering politics - sent me this WaPo piece wherein a bunch of “experts” with access to the same information all confirm their own biases…because political polls are just not a serious source of information. On the subject of WaPo I do have another friend whose way of reading tea leaves on the POTUS race is to just add 4 points to Trump in all WaPo polling results. He says that in 2016 and 2020 WaPo was consistently in undercounting Trump by 4 points. Try it. Past performance is no guarantee and YMMV.
PPS: That said - just got this from another friend. Holy smokes.
