We’ll know soon enough. But if the last 2 months of this insane midterm season have shown nothing else, they have shown that the national pollsters have their heads so far up their ass they can see their lungs.
There’s an old saying, The more things change, the more they stay the same. It may or may not be true, but when it comes to national polling, the rule should be, Sometimes when shit changes, it changes for good. And if there’s one thing that pollsters are resistant to, it’s permanent change. Because that means that pollsters are going to have to rethink their entire system.
Right now, the current polling community of this country is running on systems and presumptions that are at least decades old. Because say what you will, up until 2016, the voting and polling habits of this country really hadn’t changed that much. The pollsters didn’t just slap together a series of analytics and algorithms willy-nilly. They were created over time by what worked and proved accurate and successful.
But the world has changed in the last 50 years, and it’s changed the most in the last 14 years. And it changed in a whole lot of ways, none of which the pollsters seem ready to deal with. For starters, the explosion of the use of cell phones led to a deep decline in the reliance of landline phones, long the stalwart of pollster contacts. Poll pool denizens became harder to contact.
It changed again in 2008 when the United States elected its first African American President. That event crystallized the racism and xenophobia of the Republican party. It also marked the point where the GOP ceased to be an equal political party with ideas and an agenda, and became a party totally devoted to nothing more or less than obstruction. The GOP ceased being a functioning party, and the hardening of the party lines between democrats and Republicans becoming more acute, and the independents, the favorite of pollsters becoming smaller.
It made an irrevocable sea change in 2016. Because,with the ascension of Traitor Tot to the hierarchy of the GOP, the unthinkable happened. People actually started lying to pollsters in appreciable numbers. Trump was such a despicable shit that more moderate, mushy middle voters started telling pollsters that they were undecided, rather than admitting that they were going to vote for the mountain troll. And that skewed the accuracy of the polls.
But here’s the real reason that the national pollsters desperately need to upgrade and revamp their entire system. For decades now the pollsters have almost universally ignored the 18-24 year old voting bloc. And for good reason. Historically they were the slowest to register to vote, and the most unlikely to show up to vote, especially in midterm elections.
But that’s changed, for the better, and for good. In 2018, a social media savvy savvy group of youths, fueled by the MSD high school slaughter, turned out in record numbers to turf out 31 GOP incumbents with A or A+ NRA ratings. In 2020 they turned out in record numbers again to elect Joe Biden, driven by gun reform and climate change issues. And now in 2022, the Dean of the Harvard political science department is saying that while there might or might not be a bue wave, or a red wave, one thing is for sure. There is going to be a Generation-X wave in November. The kids are here, and they’re here to stay.
To be blunt, the current national polling system is palsied, it’s broken, and it’s obsolete. And until they get their shit together and reform their entire platform to account for the digital phone revolution, the polarization of the two major parties, and the permanent rise of the youth vote on the national stage, nothing they have to say has any real legitimacy, at least for me.
When watching news on polling, both national and at the state level I have noticed the lack of familiar names being cited. Like Gallup. Pew, Quinnipiac. What the hell have these folks been up to? Or, is it possible they have realized the very thing you’ve talked about here, that their polling models are shit. At least compared to what they once were. For all the hoopla in 2000 they got things pretty much right. The mess in FL was an aberration and if not for the screwy ballot in that one county Gore would have won FL. More narrowly than predicted but he would have won the state and the election. But pollster’s reputations took a hit. It took a while to recover and led to the rise of aggregate polling outlets like 538, Real Clear Politics and Cook.
Still, as you’ve stated everyone got it wrong in 2016 and for the reason you cited. A statistically significant (in fact a rather large number of folks) portion of those polled LIED. Then 2018 rolled around and the youth vote set records. And again in 2020. So I can’t help but wonder if the old-guard, gold standard outfits have decided NOT to stick their necks out this year. And that’s a problem because even if the methodology for gathering an accurate sample is off, at least the methodology for the questions themselves is sound. And they’ve allowed others, including and especiallly those aggregate outfits I mentioned to see it.
That’s not the case with these polls being fed into the aggregate organizations in recent weeks, and why in the past few weeks projections changed to show the GOP popping champagne corks when the results are in.
The fact is nobody knows. Campaigns are tight lipped about their internals which means they aren’t sure either. It’s gonna be a long few days.
Well, people have been lying to pollsters for a LONG time.
Remember Colorado in 1992? There was an amendment on the ballot that would ban the state and local governments from enacting any measure that would protect the LGB community (there really weren’t enough of the “T” or “Q” communities at the time–much less the “+”–to speak of) and right up to the election, the polls were reporting that the amendment would fail. One poll released shortly before the election indicated the amendment would fail by 52-42 but the final results showed the amendment’s passing by nearly the opposite, 53-46. (Of all the ballots cast, more than 4.5% were blank or invalid and nearly 80% of all registered voters actually turned out.)
So, looking at the polls–which had consistently showed the amendment’s failing–and looking at the final results, the amendment’s opponents could only consider that a large number of the people being polled were “shamed” into opposing the amendment and then, in the privacy of the voting booth, they were able to express their bigotry with no problem.
I’m well aware of it. In fact, I’d left active duty by the time Doug Wilder ran (and won) for Governor of Virginia. (I had been stationed at HQMC when I rejoined civilian life) Wilder was comfortably ahead in polling but won by less than half a percent. While some attributed the much narrower than expected margin to Wilder’s pro-choice stance (remember, this was the Virginia of thirty years ago) and a great GOTV effort by Republicans, EVERYONE knew the reality – that Wilder had become another unfortunate recipient of the “Bradley Effect.” In fact, the Bradly Effect was sometimes afterwards called the Wilder Effect but the bottom line was white people being ashamed to admit to pollsters they had no intention of voting for a black guy!
So you’re correct about lying to pollsters not being a new thing. What changed and was so significant in 2016 was we had two WHITE candidates running for President. And from where I sit the problem of register voters who will talk to a pollster lying became if not routine then much more common and I have former friends who flat out said they’d lie to fuck with pollsters and the news narrative. Hell, there was even some encouragement by folks in the GOP for them to do so!
In the end as I said I agree it’s not new. But it’s become much more prevalent than it once was and that’s a problem.
Lets face it the old method of asking people is not going to work any more. Polling folks will have to do what the major data mining companies like facebook, google, twitter do. Collect data from people, then find out how they voted and then base voting trends on who turned out and why. polling today is no better than throwing runes to the vikings for predicting wins.
the Vikings did win a lot though.
I admot that I’m not old enough to personally remember the 1948 Presidential elenctio (I was alive, yes, but I was only 3.) However, I thik everyone has seen the famous “Dewey beats Truman” headlines which were such a huge Ooops the day after. And it’s been thoroughly studied. The consensus us that the error was based on polling which was done by telephone. But, in 1948, the trend ws for rich people to own telephones – ordunary people not so much.
Of course, those were landlines, and we now have cdllular phones, smart phones, the InterNet, and heaven knows what all. I’m not sure why anyone is surprised that, with things so different, and changing so quickly, pollsters have not broken the code on how to poll. Further, the way innovation leads to more innovation, I don’t even want to take a guess at when that code will be broken – if indeed the answers don’t become obsolete faster than electins are held.